Healthcare services in Kenya’s Murang’a County have been disrupted following the reported loss of access to its AfyaKE digital health platform, triggering a dispute between Governor Irungu Kang’ata and the national government over patient records, system certification and the transition to a national health management system.
Kang’ata accused the national government of shutting down AfyaKE, which the county has used to manage hospital operations, patient records, prescriptions, laboratory results, billing and telemedicine. He said the disruption had forced public health facilities to begin migrating to the national system under the Social Health Authority (SHA).
The governor warned that healthcare workers could lose access to patients’ medical histories, complicating treatment for people returning to county facilities. Local media reported that services had been scaled down at several facilities as the county prepared to transfer its operations to the replacement platform.
The Ministry of Health rejected the allegation that it had switched off AfyaKE. Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale said the ministry neither owns nor controls the platform and does not have its source code.
Duale also disputed claims that the Digital Health Agency had refused to certify the system, saying neither the county government nor its developers had applied for certification. The ministry described AfyaKE as a private arrangement between Murang’a County and its developers.
The competing accounts leave unresolved what caused the reported loss of access, who controlled the system’s infrastructure and whether patient records remain securely available.
Dispute over integration and costs
Kang’ata said he had previously received assurances from Duale that AfyaKE would be connected to the national health infrastructure rather than discontinued.
The governor argued that the county should have been allowed to retain its existing system while integrating it with the national platform. He questioned the cost of replacing a system he described as free with a platform that he said would require additional payments.
The county has been preparing to migrate to the national health management system as part of the government’s wider Taifa Care digital health reforms. The Ministry of Health has said the transition is intended to improve health information management, claims processing and interoperability among healthcare providers.
The ministry has not, in its reported response, provided a technical explanation for the AfyaKE disruption or addressed the governor’s account of the earlier integration discussions.
Revenue and patient records at stake
Kang’ata credited AfyaKE with helping increase annual revenue collected by the county’s health facilities from about 80 million Kenyan shillings to 800 million Kenyan shillings. He said the additional revenue had supported investments in hospital infrastructure and medicine availability. The figures were attributed to the governor and have not been independently verified.
The system’s reported loss of availability also raises questions about continuity of care, particularly for patients whose medical histories, prescriptions and laboratory results are stored electronically.
The county has said the transition could take several days, with Kang’ata indicating that officials hoped to restore normal operations by Monday, October 19, subject to progress with the migration.
The immediate challenge is to ensure that healthcare workers can retrieve existing patient records and continue treating patients while the county transitions to the national system.
Neither the precise cause of the reported outage nor the extent of any data loss has been independently established. The Ministry of Health has maintained that SHA beneficiaries will continue to access healthcare through established systems, while the county’s concerns over AfyaKE remain unresolved.
