In collaboration with the Ministry of Health of Kenya and the CHU4UHC Platform, Medic supported the design and launch of a national electronic community health information system, currently scaling up to 95,000 community health workers and their supervisors.
Nairobi — It has been more than a decade since Medic piloted its first digital health program in Kenya – working diligently and iteratively to establish new and strong relationships with implementing partners, county governments, and the national Ministry of Health.
In September 2023, His Excellency President Ruto officially launched the national scaling of eCHIS and commitment to salary all community health workers in Kenya. Known as “eCHIS Kenya”, and built with the Medic-stewarded Community Health Toolkit (CHT), the digital health platform will be provided to over 95,000 Community Health Promoters (CHPs) and Community Health Assistants (CHAs) across all 47 counties, placing world-class digital technology in their hands, supporting them as they provide high-quality, timely, and equitable community-based care. In October 2023, the federal government further launched the national linkage of the eCHIS platform to the Smart Primary Care Network, initiating in Kericho County. With smartphones procured, health worker training has begun at rapid pace, with nearly 25,000 frontline health workers equipped with the technology already.
Building upon Medic’s technical leadership and the CHT’s selection as the foundational platform for the Ministry-led eCHIS, Medic worked in concert with the Ministry and the Community Health Units for Universal Health Coverage (CHU4UHC) Platform – a consortium of partners and stakeholders – to co-create features and functionalities, a roadmap for eCHIS implementation, architectural documentation for the technology, and a transition plan for the respective community-based digital health programs to migrate to the eCHIS app. This effort remains aligned with the Kenya Community Health Policy 2020-2030. After a 1.0 pilot in early 2022, and further iterations, hackathons, and training, roll out of eCHIS 2.0 began in November 2022.
The theme for the presidential launch, Afya Bora Mashinani: Accelerating universal health coverage through digitally empowered compensated Community Health Promoters, is well-aligned with Medic’s vision and core belief: a more just world in which health workers are supported as they provide care for their communities, where universal health coverage is a reality, and health is a secured human right – for everyone, everywhere, always.
This is an historic moment for Kenya, for the advancement of health worker professionalization, and for digital health to strengthen community health systems. Medic is grateful to be an integral part of this endeavor and we thank our partners their engagement, thoughtfulness, and many years of collaboration.”
Krishna Jafa
Chief Executive Officer at Medic
Kenya’s Electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS)
eCHIS was built to respond to the gaps identified in community health service delivery, including poor quality and untimely community health data, inconsistent quality of care, perennial stock outs, inconsistent community data collection and reporting, and lack of community health data governance structures at sub national levels.
In the community, health workers will use eCHIS for household- and person-level registration, community event-based surveillance, death reporting, commodity management, WASH services, social economic surveying, and maternal, newborn and child care. The platform will also support health worker supervision, messaging functionality, in-app and external dashboards and analytics, and will be interoperable with other digital health tools in the Kenyan digital health ecosystem.
The Future of eCHIS
It is with resolute determination to improve community-based health care delivery and to empower community health workers that Medic and our partners have reached this transformative milestone.
As the eCHIS roadmap continues to progress, Medic has an unwavering commitment to support the government in their digitization agenda and will work closely with the Ministry to expand the reach of eCHIS and strengthen their capacity to own and support it long-term.
Over the next year, Medic and the CHU4UHC Platform will work collaboratively to design and enhance new eCHIS modules, support the Ministry’s vision of the “Kenya Digital Health Superhighway,” achieve interoperability with priority health systems, build capacity and community, further strengthen eCHIS deployment architecture for national scale, deploy a Data Observation Toolkit (DOT) to support quality and reliability of data for decision making across the health system, and provide robust technical support.
For the full timeline and history that led to the birth of Kenya’s eCHIS, we invite you to read a blog previously published in June: Empowering Digitized Community Health in Kenya: Medic’s Journey of Impact and Growth. To learn more about our commitment to bridging the gap between communities and essential care, we invite you to read a recent blog from Chief Program Officer Robert Mutai: Empowering Communities for Universal Health Coverage: Accompanying Kenya’s Ministry of Health.
About Medic
Medic advances equitable care and strengthens global community health systems by building, innovating, applying, and scaling open-source, cost-effective digital health tools in collaboration with local, regional, and global partners. Medic serves as technical steward and core contributor of the Community Health Toolkit (CHT), a collection of free and open-source technologies; open-access design, technical, and implementer resources; and a community of practice. As steward, Medic builds and supports the CHT as a global public good; partners with Ministries of Health, NGOs, and technical organizations to design, deploy, and scale digital health apps powered by the CHT; and advances R&D for precision global health. The collaborative vision of Medic and the global CHT community is a world in which professionalized health workers are supported with world-class software as they provide care for their communities, where universal health coverage is a reality, and where health is a secured human right – for everyone, everywhere, always.
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