Kenya Disease Surveillance FHIR Implementation Guide.
0.1.0 - ci-build
Kenya
Kenya Disease Surveillance FHIR Implementation Guide., published by intellisoftConsulting. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.1.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/IntelliSOFT-Consulting/Surveillance-FHIR-IG/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions
| Official URL: http://example.org/ImplementationGuide/fhir.surveillanceIG | Version: 0.1.0 | |||
| Draft as of 2026-02-24 | Computable Name: SurveillanceFHIRIG | |||
| Name | Date | Reason For Changes | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| IntelliSOFT Consulting Limited | 18th March 2025 | Initial Draft | 1.0 |
Kenya’s Division of Disease Surveillance and Response is mandated to oversee the implementation and response to events of public health importance in line with the strategic focus of the Kenya Health Policy 2014 - 2030 and the Kenya Vision 2030 aimed at transforming the country into a globally competitive and prosperous Nation with a high quality of life by 2030.
Over the years, the Kenya MOH has transformed its local health security through the implementation of modern and sophisticated technologies and electronic data systems. These systems include the US-CDC-supported All Disease Outbreak Module (ADaM), Surveillance Health Information Exchange and Linkage Data (SHIELD), KenyaEMR, and KHIS amongst many others. Together all these systems make up the eIDSR platform. These systems have enabled the MOH to establish a highly effective pandemic and epidemic intelligence system consisting of digital interventions, services and applications for disease surveillance designed to operate within the broader MOH-led digital health ecosystem.
Despite these advancements, an evaluation conducted between July and October 2024 by the Kenya Ministry of Health through the Division of Disease Surveillance and Response, with technical assistance from the Strengthening Outbreak Notification and Response (SONAR) project; a partnership between the Global Fund and the taskforce for Global Health; brought to light persistent bottlenecks that undermine the efficiency of the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system. This includes the inability of the eIDSR system to integrate with other healthcare systems. Data from various sources, such as labs, hospitals, and surveillance networks, often remain fragmented, making it difficult to build a unified repository.
On top of that, the adoption of electronic medical records remains limited across health facilities, with many systems lacking compatibility with IDSR reporting tools, creating significant interoperability challenges. A lack of standardized reporting channels amplifies data inconsistencies between primary recording tools, summary reports, and the Kenya Health Information System. On the technical front, downtimes in critical platforms such as KHIS and eCHIS disrupt data transmission and access, compromising real-time data availability. These challenges, coupled with manual data entry errors, exacerbate data quality issues. These gaps undermine the reliability of surveillance data, which in turn limits the system's effectiveness.
In response, the Ministry of Health Kenya has proposed a plan to digitize its data collection tools, develop an integrated surveillance and lab system repository as well as transform the eIDRS platform through the implementation of the surveillance Standards-based, Machine-readable, Requirements-based and Testable (SMART) guidelines. This includes automating data analysis processes to provide near real-time insights, updating IDSR frameworks to align with global standards like FHIR, SMART guidelines and LOINC, and designing dashboards for enhanced visualization and decision-making.
To align with this vision, this DAK will serve as a foundational guide for digitizing surveillance data collection tools and integrating laboratory data into an interoperable system to support real-time case detection, outbreak analysis, and response.
This Digital Adaptation Kit is part of the SMART guidelines and includes data and health content and is generically applicable to digital systems. The contents are software-neutral, operational, and structured documentation intended to systematically and transparently inform the design of digital systems for disease surveillance in Kenya.
The intended audience for this document includes business analysts, project managers, software developers, and other project members from the Directorate of Public Health, the Ministry of Health, the Port Health Services officials, Public Health Emergency Operations Center (PHEOC), and other stakeholders. It is intended to clearly outline Kenya’s public health surveillance processes for digital system development, implementation maintenance, and training. The document also outlines the functional and non-functional requirements that will be used to verify that the developed system functions as intended.