Kenya Healthcare Federation – Information & Communication Technology and Mobile Health Committee (ICT&MH) meets to outline on 2018 key focus areas
Kenya Healthcare Federation – Information & Communication and mobile Health Committee (ICT& MH) held it’s first meeting this year to outline the essential areas to cover in this year 2018. The meeting which was chaired by Mr. Mark Achola.
Regulation of healthcare and ICT is one of the major area that the committee will focus on, to achieve this, the committee will focus on educating stakeholders and create awareness of the existing regulations and share available data, engage the relevant bodies on the lack of clear regulations, Analyze the e-Health Strategy Policy Guidelines by the Ministry of Health ICT unit and Participate in the Health Act 2017 (Research and E-Health) implementation process.
Increasing the access to health using ICT. The committee will achieve this through Sharing basic data and defining data exchange minimums, having Internal data exchange between private stakeholders, Analyzing the existing international data exchange framework which is also in the e-Health policy document and Analyzing the National healthcare strategy (MTP III) and try influence the document in terms of m-Health policies.
Endorsing possible frameworks to use ICT. The committee will look into publishing a private sector ICT analysis document similar to the Insurance report by Association of Kenya Insurers (AKI). AKI is an insurance data sharing platform and has always published an annual report.
The committee further agreed on forming subcommittees to tackle each focus area meticulously. Regulations subcommittee will be headed by Dr. Torooti Mwirigi and will focus on informing the members on regulation aspects of healthcare and ICT.
Access Increase subcommittee will be headed by Serah Mohamed and Joel Lehman and will focus on increasing data sharing between public and private and private and private stakeholders.
Following the workshop held in Naivasha on Implementation of the Health Act 2017 by Ministry of Health and IFC, the ministry of health formed 9 Technical Working Groups (‘TWGs’) where KHF is going to work closely with MOH and has been tasked to nominate representatives from the six committees to sit in the TWGs.
The meeting was well attended by ICT committee members namely, m-health, Carepay, Pharm access, PSK, Infospective, Safaricom, Medic Mobile, e-Medica ltd, MyDawa, m-Health Kenya, Access Afya, EMKF, Velocity PMC, Huawei
This committee noted that there is not much mentioned in the Health Act in terms of Research and E-Health and there is great need to participate in the implementation process to inform the ministry of health. Therefore the following will represent KHF in the Research and E-Heath TWGs in turns.
Torooti Mwirigi – Healthcare Financing, Serah Waithera – Healthcare Financing, Tony Wood – Healthcare Provider, Eric Mbuthia – Healthcare Provider, Hari Murthy – ICT Infrastructure, Adam Lane – ICT Infrastructure, Emily Nyagaki – Advocacy, Wangui Mwangi Violet – Healthcare IT Digitization, Doreen Kudwoli – Community Health Work.