National-scale health information exchange for Kenya

The problem

Kenya needed a national health information exchange that could route, validate and store patient data across facility systems, shared health records and claims processing, at production scale rather than proof-of-concept scale.

What I did

• Designed and built the HIE architecture on the Kenya Digital Health Super Highway blueprint: asynchronous message processing through Apache Kafka, FHIR storage in HAPI FHIR, central routing through OpenHIM, Keycloak for identity, and JeMPI as the master patient index.
• Built custom OpenHIM mediators for validation, data splitting, persistence and callback workflows across the shared health record and claims pipelines.
• Implemented the SMART Health Links patient portal, a Next.js app that lets patients share clinical records securely by QR code or link, using the SMART Health Links protocol and the International Patient Summary (IPS) standard.
• In parallel:
  • Sri Lanka NEHR: helped design the architecture and build services for the national EHR.
  • Indonesia HIE: built a K6 performance-testing framework from scratch.
  • TechHUB: led the end-to-end build of a reference platform where implementers can spin up live, AWS-hosted HIE testbeds.

How I showed up

Four initiatives ran at once, so I had to keep every stakeholder informed without letting any one project stall. The clearest example was the Jembi OpenHIM Platform Connectathon 2024. I gave a solo, in-person deep-dive that walked the audience through the full IPS continuity-of-care flow live, across OpenHIM, Keycloak, OCL, JeMPI, HAPI FHIR and the observability stack. I want people to understand the systems I build, not just take them on trust.

Outcome

Kenya gained a national-scale interoperability layer that the client can run and extend themselves, and the same patterns went on to shape Sri Lanka’s and Indonesia’s work.