Disrupting the Gertrude Children’s Hospital Healthcare

It is all better to act now than later. Well, the quest of delivering seamless healthcare has never been so pushed to act now than later. Much as keeping up with digital transformation in healthcare can feel overwhelming, today’s prevailing circumstances has proven that it is the way to go.

So what motivated Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital - a not-for-profit Children’s Hospital established in 1947 to choose to disrupt its healthcare services? Several worthwhile reasons as we weighed on the mechanism of how industries become more affordable and accessible.

So firstly with the patient in mind, we were motivated with the need to reform delivery of healthcare with the ultimate goal of improving lives. Secondly, the need to measure and track performance and consistent engagement with our patients fired up the team to act. Thanks to the support of the Board.

Today, standing out as the most established pediatric hospital in Eastern and Central Africa, providing healthcare to children in Kenya as well as those referred from neighbouring countries Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital attends to over 300,000 outpatients annually through a network of 15 outpatient medical centers in and around Nairobi and admits over 10,000 patients annually at its 100-bed multi - specialty hospital located at Muthaiga, Nairobi.

Licensed to provide healthcare to children and teens up to 21 years of age, the hospital provides the full range of primary, secondary and tertiary/quaternary care covering over twenty aspects of paediatric specialization.

For the hospital to deliver as the number of patients kept escalating, we had to adopt a different culture as a hospital in our approach with ICT. We do not see ICT just as a department, but as a tool. Through ICT we have disrupted some of our internal process that have ended up having a big impact on our operation efficiency, cost reduction and enhance patients experience.

ICT is now integral to our strategic thinking process and in addition to the core aspects highlighted, we are now deploying ICT to inform care processes in such aspects as population health, clinical outcomes improvement, and healthcare service planning and delivery.

Since our services are built around our patients, we chose to have the patient as the end goal in the digital design thought process that have since empowered our staff to give better services to our patients. If you don’t disrupt your internal processes, you cannot disrupt your external facing process. We have taken initiatives internally to enhance multidisciplinary collaboration which has greatly improved the adoption of ICT across all the hospital functions. I am privileged to lead an excellent team of professional staff in various disciplines. They have fully embraced the hospital’s digital strategy and consequent deployment of ICT in patient care, electronic medical records, pathology, radiology, eLearning, pharmacy, facility management, finance, procurement, and telemedicine.

The hospital has also actively worked with partners to develop solutions that have had a positive impact in the healthcare industry including healthcare financing and claims management leading to excellent efficiencies among the different stakeholders.

We are very proud to be associated with CIO 100 which has been a fantastic forum for ICT professionals to interact and share learning and innovative ideas that not only enhance the profession but also yield practical solutions for many industries. Our ICT team has benefited to a great extent by participating in CIO 100 Symposiums. The team with a relatively young workforce gives us a very firm foundation to drive ICT adoption in the healthcare sector. While we appreciate the information security risks that come with ICT use, we endeavour to continue down this tract as our strategy into the future will not succeed without significant ICT adoption.

ALLAN JUMA Technical Lead, ESET East Africa