In August, Kenya’s MoH, Kisumu County government and Living Goods embarked on a journey to pilot the country’s national community health digitization program, eCHIS. The eCHIS pilot began by deploying it to nearly 200 upskilled and digitally enabled CHWs we’re already supporting in two Kisumu sub-counties. Modeled off the Smart Health app, the government’s enhanced digital health solution now encompasses new operational features such as commodity tracking, community-based surveillance, and data visualization and validation. Existing features like household enrollment, service delivery, messaging, dashboards and automated integration into the Kenya Health Information System have also been enhanced to improve data quality and performance management.

In preparation for the eCHIS pilot, Living Goods provided support for MoH-led stakeholder sensitization and capacity building engagements at both national and county levels. We supported a national forum in July to disseminate the community health digitization strategy to key stakeholders. We also led alignment meetings to design system requirements and conducted user acceptance testing of the eCHIS prototype at national and county levels.

To kick off the pilot in Kisumu, MoH held engagements with Kisumu County leadership and Living Goods-supported MoH trainers to cascade eCHIS training to county teams, who in turn trained CHWs and their supervisors engaged in the pilot. These sessions ensured that both CHWs and their supervisors are well versed with using the enhanced tools for service delivery and managing CHW performance, and that the field teams have the capacity to provide field operations support on the technology.

The pilot is expected to end in Q1 2022, and learnings will be used to inform the next phase of scale-up. Implementing partners are also in consultation with MoH to explore scale-up in other counties for enriched insights on successful eCHIS implementation, and we’re identifying the best way to support these other partners. Kenya’s MoH ambitiously plans to scale up eCHIS to all 47 counties and ensure it has 95,000 digitally enabled CHWs by 2025.