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| Governor Irungu kang’ata |
Hospitals in Murang’a county will start using telemedicine to treat patients from next month.
The county government on Saturday brought together players in the health sector to discuss how the new system of treatment will be rolled out.
The government has already installed internet infrastructure in all 160 health facilities and telemedicine will be implemented in 44 of them in the pilot phase.
Health facilities have also had solar panels installed to cushion them from high power bills and intermittent outages.
In the Saturday conference, stakeholders showcased technologies such as mobile apps for e-consultations, e-theatre, drones for delivering medicine, mobile theatres and dialysis centres.
The county also received donations of 200 glucometers and 50 digital tablets to support the telemedicine initiative.
The government runs a dialysis centre at Murang’a Level 5 Hospital that is barely enough to cover the high number of patients from the county and neighbouring areas.
Should it succeed, the telemedicine will make it possible for patients to receive treatment in the comfort of their homes by the click of a button, saving them the cost of transport and time.
It is also expected to help relieve congestion in the referral facilities that have patients queuing for treatment at the crack of dawn.
Governor Irungu Kang’ata, who officiated the stakeholders’ conference, said telemedicine will enable the county to keep up with the rest of the world.
“This innovation will see diagnosis and treatment done remotely and through the use of technology and is one of the growing concepts in the medical world,” he said.
Financial constraints have made it difficult for many residents to access treatment in the past especially in areas where health facilities are far off, with residents choosing to brave their illnesses and only going for treatment when the disease worsens.
This is especially common with non-communicable diseases that are rampant in the county. Kang’ata said telemedicine will ensure patients are easily diagnosed and treated to improve the quality of their lives.
“Once a patient is referred from a health centre or a dispensary, they will be virtually connected to specialised doctors, saving them the need to travel”.
Kang’ata said Murang’a will be first in the country to embrace telemedicine services in public health facilities.
He said one hospital will offer telemedicine in each ward in the pilot programme that will run for six months.
The county government is already in the process of training health workers after which members of the public will also be sensitised to take advantage of the technological advancement.
The governor said the innovation will help the county decentralise medical services and will go a long way in improving health services digitally.
Kang’ata further said he had liaised with the Ministry of Health to have challenges of outages of servers that have affected delivery of automated services in local hospitals checked.
“Automation has raised the revenue we collect from Murang’a Level 5 Hospital from Sh1.6 million to Sh6 million per month. In Maragua Level 4 Hospital, revenue has increased from Sh60, 000 to Sh200, 000 per day. All these funds are ploughed back to the facilities to improve services,” he said.
Eric Wahu of BYON8 company that was started by Swedish doctors, mathematicians and programmers in 2017 to make health services more accessible through digitisation, said they will support the county government towards to effectively roll out telemedicine.
Wahu said his firm has been able to link over one million patients with telemedicine services and that their technology is widely utilised by private health facilities.
The CEO of Healthx Africa, Roy Bore, said telemedicine is common in developed nations, with several African countries slowly embracing it.
Bore said the challenge of few specialised doctors makes telemedicine the most effective way of making healthcare reachable to all patients.
by ALICE WAITHERA