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{
    "id": 1151468,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1151468/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 383,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. M. Kajwang’",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13162,
        "legal_name": "Moses Otieno Kajwang'",
        "slug": "moses-otieno-kajwang"
    },
    "content": "the Government cannot encourage innovators to come up with an Amazon -style medicine and pharmaceuticals procurement system? It is so simple to do, and has been done elsewhere. What we need is a use case, and in this case, it will be applied towards ensuring that county governments and far-flung hospitals get medication pharmaceuticals just in time. That avoids stock piling and situations where drugs meet their expiry dates because a hospital ordered too many batches or cartons of paracetamol and anti-malaria drugs. Another area where this E-Health Bill would apply would be on claims management. I hope that this will provide a framework for the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) to ensure that claims management is done, if not entirely electronically, but let the manual submission be the complementary mechanism, with the electronic being the primary mode of transmission of claims. I say this because we have seen some dispensaries and clinics springing up in our backyards. Sometimes, they do very well and when you ask, you are told that as long as you have an NHIF card, if you come and you have got a headache, you will be admitted for three to four days, whether you have got a headache or not, so as to facilitate claims from NHIF. If we make this electronic, it will be more transparent and cut out those people who want to cash in. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I have always had a problem with how insurance companies price their medical products. Before I came into this House and the days that followed the demise of the former Senator for Homa Bay County, I was in the insurance industry. One of the products that I had been mandated to build was a medical insurance product. It was not easy because without proper an actual information in the market, it is very difficult to price. It is very difficult to come up with riders and apply waivers. The insurance industry needs a database to access data on health trends in the country. This way, the industry will not come up with a one-size-fits-all product. It will be able to price and build products on the basis of demography, age, gender and occupation. That can only be done if the entire national system is electronic. The national Government was meant to ensure that there was fibre optic in all Level Four hospitals. When I last visited the Homa Bay County Teaching and Referral Hospital, I was told that the fibre had been dug up to the hospital, but there were issues with some routers and connecting devices. I urge the Cabinet Secretary and the Principal Secretary (PS) of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to make sure that all the 47 county hospitals are connected to the National Optic Fibre Backbone (NOFB). Even with that connection, we still have to deal with the issue of power. Without power, those fibre optic connections will not be useful and this is where the regulator in the space of electricity generation. We must now move towards mini-grids. We must allow places that are not in the national grid to build mini-grids using solar, wind or other sustainable and renewable energy production capacities. In one of the islands in my county, the community came together and started a diesel power plant. The island is so far-flung that it cannot be connected to the national grid. Unfortunately, the regulator came and shut it down without providing an alternative."
}