Kenya’s MOH has been working to establish and institutionalize an end-to-end digital health platform that cuts across all levels of the health system to address challenges related to information availability, quality, acceptability, utilization, cost and accountability. The MOH is moving beyond efforts to digitize facility-level services and prioritizing the integration of community health in the broader health information system. This will create a unified national electronic community health information system (eCHIS). The digitization of the health sector builds on the existing Kenya Health Policy. The draft community health strategy provides for reforms to community health services, including digitally-driven performance management, improved supervision mechanisms, compensation of community health workers and robust logistics management information systems at the last mile.

This past quarter, Living Goods supported the MOH to develop a concept note outlining the roadmap for enabling the country to select, develop, test, and implement a robust eCHIS. We are the lead technical support partner on performance management, M&E, data use and wraparound services, and will be embedding technical experts at the MOH to guide the first phase of implementation over the next three months. 

Living Goods has been called to showcase how community health can link to the broader digital platform—and support MOH and other stakeholders in the field testing, piloting and national implementation of the eCHIS. From an assessment of available digital tools, Living Goods’  Smart Health app was found to meet MOH requirements for a solution that is open-source, interoperable and fully compliant with their requirements. It was also found to successfully push data to DHIS from a pilot conducted and rolled out in Isiolo County in 2019.

We expect to formalize the MOU detailing our technical support across all phases of implementation in Q3. Living Goods will work within a coalition of MOH-coordinated stakeholders including the Council of Governors, WHO, USAID, UNICEF, AMREF Health Africa, Kenya Red Cross Society, Financing Alliance for Health, Medic Mobile and Population Council to support government in leveraging the eCHIS to drive strong performance management, revolutionize service delivery, strengthen their pandemic response and ultimately improve health outcomes.