County Government of Laikipia

Information Technology is at the center of reforms in transition to paperless operations in keeping up with the latest trends in the sector.

Laikipia County has begun in earnest the process of fully automating health provision processes across all its outlets, in a bid to revolutionize the service for the better.

The development is at the center of the ongoing reforms to the health service, which will see the service fully optimize technology to maximize efficiency in general administration, commodity, and revenue management, among other areas.

The development marks the start of an overhaul that will see the service transition to a paperless platform in the near future. This will run alongside other adjustments the service is pursuing to make the client experience the best, and has posted early successes in its key components such as the Sample Referral System.

The service is on the tail end of inclusive deliberations with health management teams from across the county on the best way to implement the transition process, which will have all the stakeholder views incorporated.

On Thursday last week, the county senior leadership, LHS staff, and ICT Department held a meeting to work around the finer details of the transition, paving way for the implementation of a program that is poised to alter the face of public healthcare provisions for the better.

The development paves way for the start of the implementation process, with the transitions into full automation now becoming a reality. The ongoing adjustments will see the convergence of related service points such as customer care, registration, cash, and insurance billing, and general administration at close proximities for ease of reach.

The move is set to maximize efficiency by speeding up processes, promoting revenue and commodity accountability. For instance, while the focus has been put on ensuring accountability in revenue management, commodity tracking has been left unaudited outside the stores, leaving so much to chance. The automation is set to correct this to enable tracking a commodity to the end-user, which is the patient.

With the development, Laikipians are looking forward to parting with intimidating paperwork, and saying hello to a paperless future while interacting with any of the LHS outlets.

Our priority in the transition process is client data safety, and we are leaving nothing to chance as we embark on this transition. said Sammy Linus, County Director of ICT and E-Government.

Already, LHS Nanyuki has demonstrated successful deployment of IT solutions in its daily operations, promising the same on a wider scale.

On a broader scale, Laikipia Health Service is poised to optimize technology for facility interconnectivity countywide, This step will especially be critical in the implementation of the Sample Referral System, where the test results are electronically transmitted back to the facility of collection for the next management plan, an initial attempt at telemedicine.

LHS is also banking on technology connectivity to generate and upload reports on a central database without the need for entry and movement of manual files. This operation will prioritize data safety, where stratified user lines will allow for varying access to data depending on logs assigned to different users based on their authority.

Any change comes at a cost, and we are prepared to meet the expenses.said Rose Maitai, Laikipia Health Service CECM. We have factored in the hardware and software components in our budget and we are good to go.