Research Activities

DHARC center has leveraged in the use of digitized health tools or customized health information systems in the gathering, compiling and analyzing health data through various study projects to curb identified gaps such as;

• lack of interoperability between systems,
• lack of a unique identifier system and
• paucity on the adoption of digital tools brought about by inadequate human resource and financial resources.

Use of digital tools and health information systems has greatly shown

• improved cost control,
• increased the timeliness and accuracy of patient care and administration information,
• increased service capacity,
• reduced personnel costs and inventory levels,
• improved the quality of patient care,
• helped in the management of population health.

“The adoption of digital tools has enabled efficient transmission of test results to guide clinical management, facilitate identification of cases for isolation to reduce transmission and provide estimates of the prevalence of the disease at the population level,” explained Prof. Karanja who is also the Dean, School of Public Health, JKUAT and End-to-End Project coordinator.

The Center has incorporated various activities/sessions that the participants are taken through to provide a platform of engagement in order to facilitate as well demonstrate the importance of digitized tools and information systems in health care.

The participants taken through four major Activities/sessions;

• Teaming Sessions
• Training Session
• Tooling Session
• Consulting Session

a. Bootcamps Activities

This involves grouping people into teams ,to research, train and design health information systems for real case implementation, support and strengthening of National and County level health information systems

These Teaming sessions include Bootcamps, Hackathons and Meetings

During the execution of the HIGDA  project COHES DHARC team successfully supported the 1st Boot Camp organized by College of Health Sciences (CoHES) in collaboration with other JKUAT Directorates, though HIGDA project.

HIGDA – DHARC team successfully supported the 1st Boot Camp organized by College of Health Sciences (CoHES) in collaboration with other JKUAT Directorates, though HIGDA project.

Universities have a duty and responsibility to equip students with academic capacity to effectively solve problems and develop innovative solutions that ultimately improves our environment and better quality of life… Read More…

b. College Hall Meetings

i). First Meeting

HIGDA-JKUAT held a successful first College Hall meeting in May 2017 to advocate for development of research agenda and to stimulate the use of GIS/WEB mapping among the university management, faculty members and students… Read More…

Dharc has conducted various trainings in health informatics, data analytics and GIS. The information and knowledge equiped by both both National ano tools provide clinicians with key insights to make informed decisions on the delivery of care and create individualized treatment plans.

Health informatics offers operational and managerial benefits as well, such as guiding health care managers and operational teams on how to use digital tools to improve time management and resource management in hospitals of which reduces the turn around time that can be costly.

Data analytics training can strengthen the already existing efforts to lower health care costs and improve the quality of care. Data analytic technologies learnt from the trainings, enables predictive analytics typically for data-retrieval capabilities; it can extract data from sources such as EHRs, medical equipment and devices, and wearable technologies. This kind of technology also often facilitates data cleaning and risk calculation… Read More…

In order to strengthen the institutional capacity to manage integrated national HMIS (DHIS2/DATIM, MFLv2,MCHUL,LMIS,DSL,IDSR), the HIGDA partners worked with JKUAT to   convene the first health care hackathon, which exposed the students to aspects DHIS2, DATIM, MFLv2, by promoting reuse of data, application building based on the data available, as well as   data visualization.

The hackathon held in June 2017 drew 70 students from various 10 different disciplines. The students were then divided into 7 groups to manipulate the data to design appropriate applications. They presented their output to the awards Panel at the end of the   exercise. Four   groups were selected to attend the boot camp… Read More…

b). Test Plans

A test plan was developed to aid providers/developers and implementers of the health systems validity of the tool. The test plan approach and tools emphasized on the on functionality, usability, interoperability, compliance, and performance... Read More…

Work with industry players in various sectors within the health domain..