Dr. Collins Mudogo is an NIH Insight Fogarty Postdoctoral Fellow with interests in digital health and the Project Manager of the Enabling Girls in AI and Growing Expertise (ENGAGE) in data science project
When a message came in that the renowned Dr. Gikonyo of the famous Karen hospital had questions, or rather, was disputing the Social Health Authority’s (SHA) figures and successes being displayed by the President himself and its Chief Executive Officer, I stood up hurriedly, picked up the remote, and increased the volume on my television to keenly listen in.
This happened during day one of the National Health Summit, held on 18th August 2026 at the Kenya International Conference Centre and broadcasted on various media stations.
Dr. Gikonyo is the one person for whom I would willingly delay my rush to catch a plane when she is on television speaking about the state of healthcare in the country. Unfortunately, she did not verbalize the text that she had allegedly sent to Nairobi’s Women Representative, Esther Passaris, regarding the same.
To counter both the silent voice and loud text by Dr. Gikonyo, Dr. Mwangangi, the CEO of SHA, stood up, pulled out her phone, and with confidence, read out figures including claims made by Karen hospital, amounts paid, amounts disputed and those pending approval.
The matter was put to rest when the current CEO of the hospital called in and confirmed that indeed there was a good working relationship between the hospital and SHA. The President’s pressure normalized.
We now know the truth, but I asked myself several questions: What if Dr. Mwangangi did not have the figures at that point? Would she have called her office at 9PM to ask her personal assistant to peruse through the files and get her the correct figures at that point? What amount of embarrassment would she have suffered before the President and public? What would the President himself, who was leading the robust discussion, have said about all the humiliation?
As a country, we saw first hand how effective digitalization promotes efficiency, increases access to accurate data and information, reduces human errors and eliminates guesswork attributable to laziness and rumours.
Well-designed digital systems have the potential to positively influence processes, improve decision-making by making relevant evidence readily available, and create positive impact at population level. Eng. Antony Lenaiyara, the CEO of the Digital Health Authority, made a great presentation that illustrated some of the milestones the government has achieved in strengthening the digital architecture and infrastructure within the health sector.
My observation was that the summit was a good start on how we can monitor progress and impact across all the six core building blocks of health systems, as espoused by the World Health Organization.
We must now start asking and working towards digitalizing the other five core blocks.
As a country that has taken lead in innovation in East Africa including MPESA, we must get to a point where digitalization goes beyond health financing to ensuring that: under service delivery, we provide safe and quality services in the remotest village in Kenya; under human resources for health, we have adequate, qualified, well-motivated, accountable and a reliable healthcare workforce; under health information, all records, data and information are available and accessible in digital platform; under health products and technologies, we can have a clear and verifiable view, through an upstream and downstream glass pipe, of all health commodities, mostly medicines.
We should be able to know what is needed, what has been ordered, what is available, what has been delivered and what has been consumed in real-time. Under leadership and governance, we should have policies, guidelines, appraisals and organograms for reporting, digitalized, making it easier to execute.
Technologies such as Geographical Information Systems can help us know exactly where to construct the next health facility based on population density and proximity to the existing health facility.
In this era and time, we have no laxity of basing decisions on emotions or hearsay. We must build capacity to innovate and digitalize so that we have access to accurate data for decision making across our health systems.
Dr. Collins Mudogo is an NIH Insight Fogarty Postdoctoral Fellow with interests in digital health and the Project Manager of the Enabling Girls in AI and Growing Expertise (ENGAGE) in data science project
