The County Government of Nandi has embarked on a journey to pilot community health digitization program.
County’s Department of Health and Sanitation is transitioning to an electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS) to boost community health volunteers’ (CHVs’) work.
Community Health Volunteers are the foundation of health systems. They conduct household visits, follow up with expectant mothers to attend their ANCs, follow up 48 hours after the birth of a child, and teach health promotive behavior among other roles. All these data need to be captured for the purpose of Community Health Services.
The Community Health Volunteers will be transitioning from analogue to digital reporting using electronic gadgets after gaining proficiency through technical training.
To kick off the pilot in Nandi, the Ministry of Health, Amref and Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB) Kenya held engagements to cascade eCHIS training to county teams, who in turn will train CHAs and their supervisors to be engaged in the pilot.
Enhanced tools for service
The training sessions will ensure that both CHAs and CHVs are well versed with using the enhanced tools for service delivery and managing CHVs performance, and that the field teams have the capacity to provide field operations support on the technology.
The Sub County Teams underwent a week long training in Kapsabet Town as ToTs on how the CHAs and CHVs will carry out their work, which includes household registration, patient screening and referrals. They will in turn cascade down the trainings to the CHAs and CHVs.
The trainings will take place in batches across all sub-counties and the CHVs will learn how to undertake their duties and use smartphones within their Community Health Units (CHU).
Once trained, they will also guide their communities on health improvement and disease prevention as well as register households at frequencies stipulated in the current guidelines.
Speaking at the event, Priscah Tero, the County Community Health Focal Person for Nandi County said that the scale-up exercise will be done in phases across all the six sub-counties to ensure all the CHVs are digitally trained and empowered. The Department of Health and Sanitation strives to have all CHVs fully digitized by the end of the year.
The County Government’s enhanced digital health solution will encompass new operational features such as commodity tracking, community-based surveillance, and data visualization and validation. Existing features like household enrollment, service delivery, messaging, dashboards and automated integration into the Kenya Health Information System will also been enhanced to improve data quality and performance management.
Digitization of community health systems is also important in monitoring progress towards the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) agenda.
