Tech in Africa
Safaricom has entered into a partnership with Nakuru county in improving health services to over 100,000 people through their integrated electronic medical records program. Afya Moja offers simple mobile-based digital health passports that receive and safely secure stored patient information. Users can access copies of this information and the ability to share it with trusted health providers.
Steve Chege, the Chief of Corporate Affairs at Safaricom expressed the company’s aim to “patient medical records portable” by focussing on diabetic patients during the early stages before slowly progressing to chronic patients.
Eight hospitals in Nakuru first in line to benefit from the Afya Moja program with a further expansion into other counties over the coming months. Safaricom will provide the technology that supports these identity-linked services. The platform was created by Safaricom, IntelliSOFT Consulting Limited, Savannah Informatics Limited, and GSMA.
Mobile health solutions remain largely untapped in Kenya and there exist many challenges to patient identification. Despite the digitization of patient information, achieving system interoperability and the right flow of patient information is not easy.
This is another foray for Safaricom into the healthtech space, after previously launching M-TIBA in partnership with CarePay and PharmAccess. Thus far M-TIBA has 4 million registered users and helps in paying for medical treatment through a mobile health wallet, and has won several international awards.
