Damien Foundation Bangladesh

Damien Foundation Bangladesh is the local chapter of an international NGO that has fought tuberculosis and leprosy for nearly a century. Their Bangladesh teams work across districts to screen, diagnose, treat, and rehabilitate TB patients — work that depends on accurate, timely data flowing from rural field facilities back into a central program-management system.

ReformedTech is the engineering partner behind their TB control program platform. We replaced spreadsheet-driven workflows with a purpose-built application across three repositories — a field-worker PWA, an admin panel, and the API that ties them together — and continue to maintain and extend it as the program scales.

What we built

• Offline-first field PWA for screening and data collection in facilities with unreliable connectivity. Built on Next.js with next-pwa for service-worker installability and Dexie (IndexedDB) for local persistence — field staff capture surveys offline, the app queues writes locally, and changes sync automatically when connectivity returns.
• Dynamic form builder for three first-class clinical instruments: Screening, Diagnosis, and HADS (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale). Forms support text, select, date, checkbox, radio, and conditional fields with validation rules, grouped sections, and add/remove repeating groups.
• Rehabilitation forms in two clinically-distinct variants — facility-based and community-based — capturing the different workflows used inside hospitals versus by community health workers.
• Admin panel for user management (role-based access), patient registry, patient-data filtering and export, patient summary views, and program dashboards. Built on Next.js 14 with shadcn/ui and Ant Design components.
• Patient data export via streaming CSV (fast-csv) so program managers can produce reports for the National TB Control Programme and donor agencies without leaving the app.
• Real-time updates via Socket.IO for collaborative views (admin sees field submissions land as they're synced).
• JWT-secured API with bcrypt-hashed credentials, JOSE token verification on the PWA edge, and validation enforced server-side via express-validator.

Stack

• Field PWA (Damien-web): Next.js 14 + React 18, next-pwa + @ducanh2912/next-pwa, Dexie + Dexie React Hooks for offline storage, React Hook Form, react-datepicker, JOSE for token verification, react-hot-toast.
• Admin UI (Damien-admin-ui): Next.js 14 + React 18, TypeScript, shadcn/ui on Radix UI, Ant Design (selectively used), Tailwind CSS, Zustand for client state with localStorage persistence, React Hook Form + Yup, lucide icons, date-fns.
• API (Damien-admin-api): Node.js + Express, MongoDB via Mongoose, JWT (jsonwebtoken) + bcrypt for auth, express-validator for input validation, Multer for file uploads, fast-csv for streaming CSV export, Socket.IO for real-time updates, cookie-parser, CORS.
• Deployment: on-premises hosting to align with patient-data sovereignty and NGO infrastructure constraints.

Outcomes

• Field data without internet — health workers complete screening and diagnosis surveys in remote facilities and the records sync back automatically when they reach connectivity.
• Fewer duplicate records — registration lookup plus server-side validation rules cut down on the duplicate-patient problem that plagued spreadsheet workflows.
• Faster reporting cycle — patient-data export to CSV directly from the admin panel removed manual aggregation work that previously took days.
• Mental-health visibility — first-class HADS support means anxiety and depression screening is captured in the same flow as TB diagnosis, not as a separate paper instrument.

Why Damien matters to us

Damien Foundation Bangladesh is a long-term local Bangladeshi engagement and one of the engagements we're proudest of. Public-health work has different constraints than commercial software — data sovereignty, low-bandwidth field reality, multilingual users, donor reporting cadences — and being a Dhaka-based team means we can show up in person at the facilities our software runs in. We're invested in this platform for the long haul.