CRS ICT4D Conference

IICD has established an innovative technology partnership called Africa eHealth Solutions (AeHS) to leverage its 15+ years of experience in implementing ehealth across Africa while ensuring that local ehealth solution provision is driven by accountable local companies able to service the needs of specific countries.

Africa eHealth Solutions International is a non-profit joint venture between IICD and Tanzanian company NPK Technologies; the company that originally developed and implemented the AfyaPro Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) across Tanzania within IICD's Tanzanian health programme. The technology partnering model between AeHS International and national AeHS companies was designed to scale the organisational capacity required to roll out and support deployments at private, public, and faith-based health facilities - from a largely Tanzanian expertise base to an entity able to provide dependable support across the sub-Saharan African region as AfyaPro deployments continue to expand to other countries. 

AeHS International has a stake in national companies that bundle software development, implementation and change management capacities, thereby servicing local health solutions provisioning with the quality management and support, incl. software release management of nationally developed add-ons and international releases, standardised training for AeHS software programmers and implementers, and certification. Currently, AeHS Tanzania, AeHS Malawi and AeHS Zimbabwe are independent entities rolling out AfyaPro and associated solutions under this partnership, and similar joint ventures in Ghana and Ethiopia are set to follow. 

In the context of having to scale deployment and support capacity while ensuring local relevance and business-driven service provision to clients, this model of interdependency between national AeHS companies and the international entity is generating valuable insights on making such models work, balancing interests of national companies, their participation in the international entity, and ensuring reliable service provision to the increasing numbers of client facilities across the different countries.