Medical records of over 22 million patients in the country have been digitised across 8,100 health facilities where the Open Source Medical Records System continues to spread its footprints, 12 years since it was developed.
This is seen as a huge boost to the Digital Health law, which was enacted in October last year by President William Ruto alongside several other pieces of legislation to accelerate implementation of the Universal Health Coverage (UHC).
A meeting bringing together over 200 technology experts from around 80 countries – to discuss the next steps in digital health – learnt that a system that was first designed to implement HIV programs in Kenya over a decade ago, is now ready for a countrywide integration of other health services.
Kenya has implemented OpenMRS for the last 12 years as Ampath Medical Records system (AMRS), KenyaEMR and e-Hospital, Health Director General, Dr. Patrick Amoth said at the meeting yesterday.
“Over time, these OpenMRS based Electronic Medical Records- EMRs, have evolved into important Health Information Systems that support public health programs in many public, private and faith-based institutions in Kenya and the region,” he noted, saying the country should quickly adopt this system to cover all other health services.
Funding implemented
Through funding from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); OpenMRS has been implemented in over 2,300 health facilities in Kenya. To-date, according to Dr. Amoth, services offered to over 90 percent of patients on Anti-retroviral therapy have been digitized using OpenMRS.
“Additionally, many facilities are adopting and implementing KenyaEMR as facility-wide EMRs, an investment that has partly become a great foundation on which Kenya’s health sector-wide digitization initiatives are being built,” noted the DG when he officially opened the five-day meeting at a Nairobi hotel.
HIV programme
He termed the system, an Open Innovation that can be easily adopted by the rest of Africa or implementers.
“HIV program was an early adopter of OpenMRS, but it is time to expand,” he said.
His remarks were echoed by Brace Potma, Director of Product at OpenMRS, an innovation by the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH). She noted that Kenya, like all sub-Saharan countries, is shifting to UHC, and at the core of it is; health service digitization/automation to be achieved through digitization.
“Financial inclusion, for instance, will be achieved through Kenya’s social Health Insurance program, and person-centred care is imperative for UHC to succeed,” she told People Daily yesterday. Person-centred care involves holistic care of a person’s health, not just diseases in them.
“And UHC involves empowering individuals to access their data and be in control of their own health,” she added. From Emergency Nursing to Product Management, Potma says she loves working with teams to make life better for others.
The new normal that implementers of OpenMRS therefore, according to Potma, should embrace is that all departments in health facilities that offer services should be fully digitized as an imperative for UHC.
In Kisumu county, six of the 200 facilities, about 65 percent of them, have Kenya EMR. Dr Gregory Ganda, the County Health CEC said Kenya EMR in 165 facilities is running mainly in the pharmacies and in the HIV clinics, because the region bears one of the highest burden for the disease.
He said that’s how the Kenya EMR came in, and has grown inside there with the focus on managing HIV.
“But then, Kisumu was also one of the first counties to start the Primary Care Network (PCN) programme, even before elections.
“And the PCN is about the facilities working together in an interoperability system to be able to serve a population so that they are in Complementation and not in competition,” he said, during a presentation.
He pointed out that for the PCN programme to succeed, the county needed a system to leverage on the ability of the facilities being able to communicate, and healthcare workers be able to monitor the progress of what they were doing in a seamless system.
“So we adopted the Kenya EMR,” he said, noting that it has enabled most of the facilities in the county to operate on a 24-hour roster.
Dr Davis Kimang who works as a support staff for the US’s Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) HIV Program in Kenya, specifically in the Health Information System, said that the plan is to ensure all the 2,400 facilities get to a point where they have a digital system for the entire health facility and support UHC in line with the MOH agenda.
“In the last two months alone we have 60 facilities managing an integrated system, where HIV patients are also screened for other diseases, and that number of facilities is growing by the day,” he said.
