Hospital Management System for Garissa Hospitals and Clinics

Long distances, mobile pastoralist populations and humanitarian programmes: the hardest operating conditions in the country.

Healthcare in Garissa County

Garissa County Referral Hospital is the referral tier for the county and much of the north-east. The county also hosts large refugee settlements served by humanitarian health programmes, and many communities are pastoralist and mobile.

Garissa asks more of a hospital system than almost anywhere in Kenya, and the requirements are not the ones a Nairobi vendor thinks about.

Offline is the normal case. Away from the town, connectivity is intermittent or absent for long periods. A system that needs a live connection to register a patient will not be used. AfyaConnect installs as an app on a phone or tablet, keeps working without a connection and synchronises when one returns.

Mobile populations. Pastoralist patients may be seen at different facilities months apart. National ID captured at registration, and a record that can be found again, matter more here than anywhere.

Surveillance matters. The north-east borders Somalia and Ethiopia and sees outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and measles. Coded diagnoses and IDSR alert thresholds turn routine consultations into an early warning. See our guide to IDSR weekly reporting.

Programme and donor reporting. Facilities supported by humanitarian partners report to those partners as well as to the county. Data captured once, and counted for both, saves clinical staff from keeping two sets of books.

Payment. Cash and mobile money dominate at the counter, and fast, reliable collection at the till matters.

We are honest about the limits: no software fixes a missing network for weeks at a time. What offline design does is make sure the work done during the gap is not lost or left on paper.

Where Garissa facilities usually start

Registration, consultation and pharmacy, on tablets, with offline operation introduced once staff trust the system. IDSR reporting is added early because it is where the data matters most.

AfyaConnect is cloud-hosted and supported remotely from Nairobi. There is no branch office in this town — onboarding, training and support are delivered online and by phone, which is why a facility here is set up on the same timeline as one in the city.

What Garissa facilities run on AfyaConnect

AfyaConnect in Garissa — common questions

Do you support hospitals and clinics in Garissa?
Yes. AfyaConnect is cloud-hosted, so a facility in Garissa runs on exactly the same system as one in Nairobi, with the same features and the same support. Onboarding, data migration and staff training are delivered remotely, and the setup timeline is the same wherever the facility is.
Is there an AfyaConnect office in Garissa?
No — and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Support is delivered remotely from Nairobi by phone, WhatsApp and screen share. For most facilities that turns out to be faster than waiting for a site visit, because a configuration question gets answered the same hour rather than the following week.
Will it work with the internet connection we have in Garissa County?
It is built on the assumption that the connection will fail sometimes. AfyaConnect installs as a progressive web app, so registration, consultation notes and dispensing continue working through an outage and synchronise when the line comes back. It runs on ordinary Android phones and tablets, not just desktops.
Does it handle SHA claims for facilities in Garissa County?
Yes. SHA membership is verified at registration and claims are built from the clinical record and submitted from inside the system, the same way for every contracted facility regardless of county. Legacy NHIF claims still in the pipeline are tracked alongside.

Other towns we work in

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