Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale has said the digital health platform at the centre of a court fight with Murang'a County was hosted on a system owned by the National Intelligence Service (NIS), not by the Ministry of Health, in the latest twist in a dispute that the county says has crippled services at its hospitals.

Speaking on Citizen TV's Sunday Live on October 25, Duale said three counties, Murang'a, Makueni and Tharaka Nithi, had been running health records on a platform that did not belong to his ministry. "There were three counties that were using a system that did not belong to the Ministry of Health," he said, according to Citizen Digital, adding that the system belonged to the NIS under former President Uhuru Kenyatta's government.

The CS said Makueni and Tharaka Nithi had since migrated to the national digital health integration system run by the Digital Health Agency (DHA), but Murang'a had declined. He said the ministry had been in talks with Governor Irungu Kang'ata for about nine months without reaching an agreement.

What Murang'a says

Murang'a's government says its AfyaKE platform was switched off, leaving health facilities unable to retrieve patient records or process claims to the Social Health Authority (SHA). The county has gone to court, accusing the ministry, through its agents, of shutting the platform down during the national transition to the Health Management Information System (HMIS).

According to court documents cited by Citizen Digital and The Eastleigh Voice, the disruption left more than 170 health facilities unable to operate normally. The county also argues that HMIS cannot support telemedicine, which it describes as a key part of how it delivers care. The county has warned that problems with claims could hit hospital revenue.

Ministry denies switching it off

The ministry rejects the claim that it pulled the plug. In a statement dated October 15, Duale said the ministry does not own, control or manage AfyaKE and does not hold its source code. "The system is a private arrangement between the County Government of Murang'a and its developers," the statement said.

It added that the DHA had not refused to certify AfyaKE, and that neither the county nor the developers had applied for certification, a step required for systems that connect to the national health data network.

The Eastleigh Voice noted that Duale's weekend description of the platform as an NIS system sits uneasily with the ministry's earlier description of it as a private arrangement between the county and its developers. Neither account has been independently verified, and the reports carried no direct response from Governor Kang'ata to the NIS claim.

Part of a wider switch

The fight comes as the ministry pushes all hospitals off the old SHA provider portal and other standalone platforms onto HMIS, which it says will end the repeated entry of the same data by health workers and make records easier to share across facilities. SHA has warned that facilities that miss the migration deadline risk losing their contracts.

Thousands of public Level 2 to 4 facilities have already moved, according to the ministry, but the Murang'a case shows the political and legal friction the transition is generating between national and county governments, which run most public hospitals under devolution.

For patients in Murang'a, the immediate concern is practical: whether their records can be accessed when they visit a clinic, and whether hospitals can continue to be paid by SHA while the two governments argue over who owns the system.

Photos: The Eastleigh Voice; Eliud Wanja/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)