# Hospital Management System for Meru Hospitals and Clinics

> A large agricultural county on the slopes of Mount Kenya, with strong mission hospitals and a growing chronic-disease caseload.

Source: https://www.afyaconnect.africa/hospital-management-system/meru
Publisher: AfyaConnect HMS (Neurobyte Technologies), Nairobi, Kenya

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A large agricultural county on the slopes of Mount Kenya, with strong mission hospitals and a growing chronic-disease caseload.

## Healthcare in Meru County

Meru Teaching and Referral Hospital is the county referral tier, and the county has a long-established mission hospital sector alongside sub-county hospitals and private facilities.

Meru is a big county, stretching from the slopes of Mount Kenya to dry lowlands, and its facilities serve populations that live very differently.

**Mission hospitals with long histories.** Faith-based hospitals have served Meru for generations. Many still keep decades of paper records, and the question when moving to software is not how to digitise everything but where to draw the line. Most facilities bring current patients across and keep the archive as an archive. Our guide to [moving from paper to a hospital system](/resources/switching-from-paper-excel-to-hospital-software-kenya) covers how.

**Chronic disease is rising.** Hypertension and diabetes are a growing share of outpatient work. These patients come back every month for years, and the value of the record is the trend, which a paper file cannot show. The [NCD clinic module](/solutions/ncd-diabetes-hypertension-clinic-software-kenya) is built for this.

**Highland and lowland sites.** A facility group in Meru may run a hospital in town and dispensaries in areas where connectivity is poor. Offline operation on a phone or tablet is what makes software usable at those sites at all.

**Agricultural incomes.** Many patients are paid seasonally. Deposits, partial payments and M-Pesa in instalments are part of how bills are actually settled here.

## Where Meru facilities usually start

Clinical records and the NCD clinic together for facilities with a large chronic cohort, otherwise registration and billing. Pharmacy follows so that repeat prescriptions and stock join up.

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.

## AfyaConnect in Meru — common questions

### Do you support hospitals and clinics in Meru?

Yes. AfyaConnect is cloud-hosted, so a facility in Meru 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 Meru?

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 Meru 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 Meru 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.