As a volunteer, I built a form builder system for Ayder Comprehensive Specialized (Referral) Hospital in Tigray, Ethiopia, one of the largest referral hospitals in the country, to digitize how it collects pregnancy (antenatal care) and patient checkup data. The work was part of the broader VODAN-Africa health-data effort, and it landed in a region rebuilding its health services after years of conflict.

What It Did

• A form builder that let hospital staff create and customize their own data-collection forms, adding new forms and fields without needing a developer each time
• Digitized antenatal-care and routine checkup records that had been captured on paper, turning them into structured, consistent data
• Standardized how maternal-health data was recorded across the hospital, so records were complete, comparable, and reusable, not scattered across paper sheets

Why It Mattered

A referral hospital like Ayder serves a large population across northern Ethiopia, and reliable maternal-health data is exactly what it needs to track patient care and plan services, especially in a region recovering from conflict. Building it as a volunteer meant the hospital got a tool it could keep using and adapt on its own, at no cost.