Rollout of Digital Health Platform (DHP) in Nakuru County

By Ruth Magak

Nakuru is among the seven counties earmarked for the deployment of the Digital Health Platfrom-DHP, a system developed by the Ministry of Health to help counties effectively monitor the Health Sector and roll out Universal Health Coverage.

The County’s Department of Health today held a forum to demonstrate the DHP targeting the system users like first-line health service providers, Medical Superintendents, Health Records, and Information Officers, Clinicians, Health Administrators, and Pharmacists across all high volume facilities.

The system will capture health data in all service delivery points, surveillance of diseases, provide patient-level data, provide service statistics including reports, analytics, and visualization at all levels, and Health Products and Technology Management.

The Ministry of Health has the vision to come up with comprehensive, integrated digital health information systems as stated in the Health Act, 2017 section 105.

The system is configured with an integration bit to ensure other state systems are interoperable with the system like KEMSA, NHIF, IPRS, and other regulatory bodies. It will also integrate with other non-state systems like existing Electronic Medical Records – EMRs currently being used within the health sector and medicine outlets like MEDS to power telemedicine.

The DHP has a patient portal to enable the patients to have self-service access to generate their patient data from wherever they are.

The system is patient-centric to ensure patients receive the best possible medical care and a reduced cost of service delivery.

DHP will ensure efficient portability of patient records, reduce the turnaround time in services access, Horizontal and vertical referrals, and enhance accountability and transparency by minimizing revenue leakages and proper management of commodities.

Chief Officer for Public Health Services Dr Daniel Wainaina said that digitization has enabled the health sector to practice telemedicine. The full rollout of this system will help policymakers get real-time data for decision-making and policy formulation, planning, and identification of trends, patterns, and relationships in the health sector.

Dr Wainaina noted that this comes just two days after the President of the Republic, H.E. Dr William Ruto made a deliberate declaration to embrace technology.

He noted that the County will fully support this project as automation is one of the flagship projects in the Health Sector Strategic Plan and H.E Governor Susan Kihika’s agenda to digitize the drug management system.