Kenya’s national health information systems face potential disruption following the withdrawal of external funding that supports critical digital infrastructure.
An analysis by the University of Nairobi’s Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (CEMA) shows that the Sh513 million allocated by the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) for the 2024-25 financial year to maintain these platforms is ending, with no domestic budget in place to replace it.
Health information systems are digital platforms that collect, store, manage, and transmit medical data across healthcare facilities.
They enable tracking of patient records, disease surveillance, immunisation coverage, and service delivery.
The systems include Electronic Medical Records (EMR) used in facilities nationwide, Kenya Health Information System (KHIS2), Chanjo KE for immunisation tracking, Damu KE for blood services management, and HIV data platforms.
They depend on donor funding for maintenance, upgrades, staff training, and cybersecurity support.
‘External funding is used to pay for installation and maintenance of information systems and generally strengthens health system building blocks (governance, financing, and service delivery),’ read the analysis.
According to CEMA, most donor support for these systems operates off-budget, giving the State limited visibility into actual operational costs.
‘Health information systems, including EMRs, KHIS2, Chanjo KE, Damu KE, and HIV data platforms, also depend heavily on external funding, with PEPFAR allocation of around Sh513 million for maintenance and support in the financial year 2024-25,’ CEMA said.
The EMR requires constant maintenance to function. Without paid technical support, server problems could prevent clinics from accessing patient histories, blocking doctors from retrieving viral load results for HIV patients and pharmacists from verifying medication histories.
Similarly, KHIS2, which aggregates health data from thousands of facilities daily, could face operational challenges when database management and backup system contracts expire, a situation that would force health facilities to rely on paper reporting while compromising the digital infrastructure that converts reports into national surveillance data needed for disease outbreak detection.
In addition, Chanjo KE provides real-time data, allowing health officials to identify children missing vaccinations. It coordinates blood supply between donation centres and hospitals, enabling facilities to locate available blood supplies and blood banks to track inventory and expiration dates.
Meanwhile, HIV programme monitoring, which tracks hundreds of thousands of people on antiretroviral treatment, also faces significant disruption. It is through this programme that specialists monitor treatment adherence, appointment attendance, viral load testing, and treatment failure risk across the country’s HIV care network.
However, the government cannot immediately allocate replacement funds without detailed cost assessments required to determine exact transition costs, a process that has not yet been done.