I remember the exact moment the news reached me. It was the first day of the National Health Summit, 18th August 2026, at the Kenya International Conference Centre, and the event was being broadcast live on television. I was at home, half-listening, when a message came in that Dr. Gikonyo—the celebrated specialist from the Karen hospital—was questioning, or perhaps outright disputing, the figures that the Social Health Authority had been presenting as proof of success. Those same figures had just been displayed by the President himself and by the CEO of the Authority. The message said she had also sent a text to Nairobi’s Women Representative, Esther Passaris, voicing her concerns. I stood up hurriedly, picked up the remote, and turned up the volume. Dr. Gikonyo is one person whose opinion I trust deeply; she is someone for whom I would willingly delay catching a plane just to listen to her speak about healthcare in our country. But on this occasion, she remained quiet on stage. The text was circulating, but she did not verbalize it. The silence felt heavier than any shouted accusation. The President’s face seemed to tighten; the room buzzed with barely contained whispers. Then Dr. Mwangangi, the Chief Executive Officer of the Social Health Authority, stood up. She pulled out her phone with a calm, deliberate motion, and began to read from it. She listed figures with remarkable confidence: the claims Karen hospital had made, the amounts already paid, the amounts disputed, and those waiting for approval. There was no hesitation, no shuffling of papers. The facts were right there in her hand. What followed was even more defusing: the current CEO of the hospital called in and confirmed that the relationship between the hospital and the Authority was, in fact, healthy. The President relaxed. We all exhaled. The crisis ended as quickly as it had begun.
But once the broadcast ended, I found myself unable to shake a series of uncomfortable questions. What if Dr. Mwangangi had not had those figures at that precise moment? What if she had been forced to call her office at nine in the evening and ask her personal assistant to rummage through files, searching for a single number? How much embarrassment would she have suffered in front of the President, the summit delegates, and the watching public? And what would the President have said, he who was leading the robust discussion, if his senior official had been caught empty-handed? The more I thought about it, the more I realized this was far more than a story about bureaucratic competence. It was a public demonstration of what digitalization can do. We saw with our own eyes how effective digital systems promote efficiency, expand access to accurate data and information, reduce human errors, and eliminate the guesswork that too often comes from laziness, half-truths, and rumours. A well-designed digital health system gives decision-makers the power to verify, explain, and act with evidence. It protects them from political embarrassment, but more importantly, it protects citizens from bad decisions. It changes the atmosphere of a room: instead of fear and suspicion, there is confidence and clarity. During the same summit, Eng. Antony Lenaiyara, the CEO of the Digital Health Authority, made an impressive presentation illustrating the milestones the government has already achieved in strengthening digital architecture and infrastructure within the health sector. I listened to him with genuine hope. For the first time, I felt that the country was beginning to take digital health seriously. But I also knew, in my heart, that we had only touched the surface. The summit was a good start—an encouraging step toward monitoring progress and impact across all six core building blocks of health systems, as the World Health Organization defines them. The question now is whether we can move from a good start to a complete transformation.
Let me be clear about what a complete transformation would look like. The first building block, health financing, has now received the greatest attention, and the Social Health Authority is beginning to show that digital claims and payments can work. But we must not stop there. Kenya is a country that has led innovation in East Africa, from M-PESA to countless mobile applications that have changed the way we live, work, and do business. If we can send money by phone, if we can run entire banks on mobile networks, we can surely build a digital health system that touches every part of the sector. Under service delivery, for instance, we should be able to provide safe and quality services in the remotest village in Kenya. The distances are long, the roads are often poor, but data does not have to be a distant city thing. With digital systems, a health worker in a rural dispensary can receive decision support, access telemedicine consultation, and refer patients efficiently without trying to flag down a passing vehicle to carry a paper referral letter. Under human resources for health, we should be able to see, with a click, whether we have adequate, qualified, well-motivated, accountable, and reliable healthcare workers across the country. We should know which facility has a nurse on leave, which doctor needs supervision, which county is short of specialists, and which worker deserves recognition. Digital human resource systems can transform morale and performance, replacing patronage with merit. Under health information, all records, data, and information should be available and accessible in digital platforms. No more duplicate patient files, no more lost medical histories, no more relying on what a relative remembers about a patient’s allergies. In an emergency, every second counts, and the right information at the right time can mean the difference between life and death. Let us not pretend that these things are impossible. They are difficult, yes, but far from impossible. We simply need the collective will to do them.
And we need the same intensity when it comes to health products and technologies. I want a Kenya where we can look through a transparent upstream and downstream glass pipe, as I like to call it, and see every health commodity moving through the system—especially medicines. Right now, too many stories end with empty shelves, expired stock, or drugs vanishing into unknown hands. A transparent digital supply chain would give us real-time answers to questions that presently generate only shrugs: What is needed in which facility? What has been ordered? What is available in the central warehouse? What has been delivered to a county? What has actually been consumed by patients? With that kind of visibility, we can shift supplies from places with surplus to places with shortages before someone dies waiting. We can identify fraud and inefficiency and stop it at its root. We can give procurement officers and clinicians the same picture, so that everyone is accountable to the same set of facts. Beyond commodities, we must also digitalize leadership and governance. Policies, guidelines, performance appraisals, and organograms for reporting should all be available in secure digital systems. When every manager knows exactly what their mandate is and to whom they should report, execution becomes simpler. When citizens know how decisions are made and how complaints are resolved, trust begins to grow. Governance is not only about laws and high-level offices; it is about daily clarity. Technologies such as Geographical Information Systems can also help us decide where to construct the next health facility. Instead of building on political pressure or emotional arguments, we could look at maps of population density, road distances, existing facilities, and epidemiological burden, and then choose the location that will serve the greatest number of people. This is not an abstract dream. It is a practical, measurable way to design a health system that leaves no one behind.
In this era and time, we have no excuse for basing decisions on emotions or hearsay. We have witnessed the damage that rumour and opacity can cause. We have seen leaders stumble because they did not have data at hand, and we have seen patients suffer because systems depended on memory, paper, and luck. The health sector is too serious for guesswork. We must build our capacity to innovate and digitalize so that accurate, timely data become the natural foundation for decision-making across the entire health system. This is not only about buying computers and apps. It is about building trust and culture. Health workers need to see that data entry is not an administrative burden but a powerful tool that improves their daily practice. Managers need to learn how to read and interpret dashboards, not blindly accept printed tables. Communities need to feel that their privacy is protected, that their health data will not be sold or misused, and that sharing information will actually help them in return. We need to invest in connectivity, electricity, hardware, software, cyber-security, and training—all at the same time. We need to reach beyond Nairobi and Mombasa, beyond cities and towns, to the small dispensaries where the real battle for public health is won or lost. And we must do all of this with a spirit of openness and collaboration, inviting private-sector partners, universities, and civil society to share in both the responsibility and the reward. The digital health agenda cannot be owned by one ministry or one agency. It must be a national movement, built by many hands, informed by many voices. The government has shown good intentions; the summit proved that. But intentions must be matched with investment, measurement, and the willingness to correct course when something is not working.
This is the mission that drives me. My name is Dr. Collins Mudogo, and I am an NIH Insight Fogarty Postdoctoral Fellow with a deep interest in digital health. I am also the Project Manager of the Enabling Girls in AI and Growing Expertise (ENGAGE) in data science project, which is dedicated to opening the world of artificial intelligence and data science to girls and young women. Some people ask me why I spend so much time on a project that seems far removed from hospitals and clinics. My answer is simple: the data scientists of tomorrow are the ones who will build the systems we need today. If we truly want a health system that runs on accurate data, we must train a generation of people who can build those systems ethically and creatively. We cannot rely entirely on imported software, consultants, or foreign experts. We need local talent that understands the country’s realities, languages, and cultures. That means bringing more girls into STEM classrooms, more young women into data science labs, and more communities into the digital world. The health summit was an encouraging sign; it showed leaders arguing with numbers, not insults. But the struggle is far from over. We need to move from moments of crisis to systems of calm, from heroic phone calls to everyday dashboards, from selective digitalization in one block to comprehensive digitalization across all six building blocks of health. We need to make data available, accurate, and safe. We need to monitor progress and impact at every level, from the national policy council to the village health clinic. And we need to ensure that when the President or the public asks a difficult question, the answer is already there, glowing on the screen, true and verifiable. That is the Kenya I believe we can build. That is the future I have committed my career to, and I know it is possible if we choose to build it together.