Community health workers do some of the most important work in healthcare, often in places where the clinic is far away and the signal is weak. They need tools that work the moment they reach for them, whether or not the network does.
Cairn was created in partnership with the Flame Lily Foundation, an organisation focused on improving women's health, with the goal of reaching Zimbabwean women in particular.
What Cairn does
Cairn is a decision-support tool for menstrual health triage. A health worker can run a structured assessment, get a clear recommendation, and record the result, all from a single screen. It supports individual and batch assessments, tracks follow-ups, and points to referral clinics.
Because health data matters beyond the device, Cairn can export to DHIS2 and sync when a connection returns. There's even a training mode, so new workers can practise on mock patients before seeing real ones.
Offline-first by design
The core principle was simple: the app must never be blocked by a missing connection. Assessments are saved locally first, then synced when the network allows. This means a worker in a rural area can capture a full day of patient data without worrying about bars of signal.
We built it open source, because health tools should be inspectable, adaptable, and available to the people who need them most.
Language is part of the product
A tool is only accessible if people can use it in their own language. Cairn ships in five, including English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, and Setswana. Getting the wording right in every language took as much care as the code, and we think it shows.
What we learned
Offline-first isn't a feature you bolt on at the end, it's an architecture. Once you decide the local device is the source of truth, every other decision, sync, export, training, follows from it. We'll carry that lesson into every system we build from here.