Murang’a County has been forced to revert to manual hospital operations after a major technical failure crippled the AfyaKe digital health system, Governor Irungu Kang’ata announced on Monday, June 23.
In an official notice to the public, Governor Kang’ata placed the blame squarely on the national government, saying the county was powerless to fix the system outage since AfyaKe is fully managed by the Ministry of Health.
“We wish to inform the public that the AfyaKe System, managed by the Ministry of Health through National Government, is currently experiencing unexpected downtime. This interruption is beyond the control of the County Government,” read the governor’s statement.
https://www.kenyans.co.ke/news/113421-patients-struggle-afyake-system-muranga-county-faces-downtime
To ensure continuity of services, Kang’ata confirmed that hospitals and health centres across Murang’a had temporarily resumed manual operations, promising residents that care would not be disrupted.
AfyaKe, launched in 2023, is a nationwide digital health records system intended to support Kenya’s Universal Health Coverage (UHC) plan.
It integrates hospital management systems, patient records, commodity tracking, and even telemedicine through a single, interoperable platform.
However, since its rollout, the platform has been plagued with technical issues, with some hospitals occasionally grinding to a halt during outage.
Governor Kang’ata’s comments come amid increasing scrutiny over the digitisation of Kenya’s healthcare system, particularly as it intersects with data privacy and access.
A recent regulation the Digital Health Information Management Regulations 2024 has raised eyebrows by requiring researchers and medical students to pay up to Ksh30,000 to access data collected under the Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF), sparking debates about the commodification of public health information.
