# Hospital Management System for Kenyan Hospitals > The full hospital platform — registration through discharge, with SHA claims and M-Pesa billing wired into the clinical workflow rather than bolted on afterwards. Source: https://www.afyaconnect.africa/solutions/hospital-management-system-kenya Publisher: AfyaConnect HMS (Neurobyte Technologies), Nairobi, Kenya --- The full hospital platform — registration through discharge, with SHA claims and M-Pesa billing wired into the clinical workflow rather than bolted on afterwards. ## What's included - Patient registration with SHA/NHIF member lookup and duplicate detection - Outpatient and inpatient workflows: triage, consultation, admission, ward round, discharge - Bed and ward management with live occupancy - Theatre scheduling with surgical safety checklist enforcement - Billing with M-Pesa STK push, split cash/mobile payments and KRA eTIMS invoices - Role-based access down to the department, with a full audit trail - Works offline as an installable PWA and syncs when the connection returns A hospital management system earns its place on one test: does the same information get typed in twice anywhere? If reception types the patient's details, and the pharmacy types them again, and the claims clerk types them a third time onto the SHA portal, you do not have a hospital management system. You have three filing cabinets that happen to be electronic. AfyaConnect is built so that a patient is registered once and everything downstream — the consultation note, the lab order, the dispensed drugs, the bill, the claim — hangs off that one record. ## What a Kenyan facility actually needs from an HMS The generic international systems are competent and expensive, and then you discover they have no idea what SHA is. The gaps that matter here are specific: - **SHA and NHIF are not an afterthought.** Eligibility has to be checkable *before* the service, because after the service it is too late — an inactive member becomes a bad debt. Our claims module checks eligibility at registration. - **M-Pesa is the payment method, not a payment method.** Billing has to handle an STK push, a partial payment in cash and the balance on mobile money, and produce a receipt the patient can be sent on WhatsApp. - **The connection will drop.** Any system that requires an unbroken internet connection to register a patient will be abandoned within a month. AfyaConnect installs as a PWA and continues working through an outage. - **KRA eTIMS applies to you.** Invoices have to be eTIMS-compliant, and retrofitting that onto a system that was not designed for it is painful. ## From registration to discharge **Registration.** Patient is created or found — duplicate detection catches the same person arriving with a slightly different spelling. SHA/NHIF membership is verified here, while there is still time to do something about the answer. **Triage.** Vitals and an acuity score. The queue reorders itself so the sickest patient is not sitting behind eleven routine reviews. **Consultation.** The clinician has the full history, allergies and previous results on one screen. Orders for laboratory, imaging and pharmacy are raised from inside the note, so the lab receives the order the moment it is written. **Admission.** Bed assigned from live occupancy — the board shows what is actually free, not what was free at the morning meeting. Ward rounds, nursing observations, drug administration and fluid balance are recorded against the admission. **Theatre.** Scheduling with the surgical safety checklist enforced by the system rather than by memory. Two never-events — operating on the wrong site and a retained item — are blocked at the database level, not merely discouraged by a form. **Discharge and billing.** The bill assembles itself from what was actually done. Payment by M-Pesa, cash or a split of the two, with an eTIMS-compliant invoice. The insurance claim is built from the same clinical record, which is why it matches. ## What this replaces Most facilities we onboard are running some combination of a paper register, an Excel workbook that one person understands, a standalone pharmacy till and a WhatsApp group for the lab results. That arrangement works until the day someone is on leave. The honest comparison is not "software versus no software" — it is "one system versus five half-systems that do not reconcile", and the reconciliation is where the money is lost. If you are still at the comparison stage, our guide to [choosing a hospital management system in Kenya](/resources/best-hospital-management-system-kenya) sets out the questions worth asking any vendor, including us. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is a hospital management system? A hospital management system (HMS) is the single system a facility runs its day on: it holds the patient record, moves the patient through triage, consultation, admission and discharge, and produces the bill and the insurance claim at the end. The point of one system rather than several is that the clinical record and the money come from the same data, so the claim matches what was actually done. ### How long does it take to get a Kenyan hospital running on AfyaConnect? A small clinic with one or two service points is usually live within a week. A level 4 or 5 facility with pharmacy, laboratory, wards and theatre typically takes three to six weeks, and most of that time is data migration and staff training rather than software configuration. The system itself is cloud-hosted, so there is no server to procure. ### Do we need our own server or IT department? No. AfyaConnect is cloud-hosted and reached through a browser, so there is no server to buy, no database to back up and no operating system to patch. What you do need is reliable devices at each service point and a working internet connection — and because the system installs as a PWA, it keeps working through a short outage and syncs when the line comes back. ### Can it handle more than one facility or branch? Yes. A group can run several hospitals or clinics under one account with per-facility data isolation, shared patient identity across the group where you allow it, inter-facility referrals, and consolidated reporting across all sites. ### What happens to our existing patient records? They come across. We import from spreadsheets, CSV exports from a previous system, or a direct database extract where the old vendor will provide one. Records that cannot be matched cleanly are flagged for a human to resolve rather than silently merged — you review those before go-live.