Description
Background
In Kenya, cancer care often suffers from fragmentation across screening, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. To address these gaps, we developed a fully integrated, AI-powered digital ecosystem for cervical and breast cancer management anchored in clinical workflows and aligned with Kenya’s National Cancer Control Strategy.
Methods
The ecosystem was designed with clinicians, public health experts, and policymakers in mind. It consists of three components:
(1) a mobile clinical decision support app for use at all levels of care, which captures structured patient data and provides AI-driven recommendations for diagnosis, staging, referral, or follow-up;
(2) a centralized cancer registry linked to a public health dashboard, allowing monitoring of incidence, treatment gaps, and regional disparities;
(3) a research portal enabling stakeholders to interrogate data through natural language queries for planning and scientific publication. Interoperability and standards such as HL7 FHIR were prioritized.
Findings
A functional prototype has been developed and tested with sample datasets. Preliminary outputs show that:
The CDS app streamlines patient data entry and aligns clinical decisions with national guidelines.
The dashboard highlights regional disparities in screening coverage and treatment access.
The research portal demonstrates feasibility of generating analytic queries for policy and planning.
Demonstrations at stakeholder forums (including the National Cancer Summit) generated positive feedback, with clinicians emphasizing reduced documentation burden, and policymakers highlighting value for real-time surveillance.
Conclusion
By connecting point-of-care decision support with national-level surveillance, the platform operationalizes a digital continuum of cancer care. This approach improves patient management, strengthens data-driven policymaking, and creates a feedback loop between practice and policy. The model demonstrates how standards-based, AI-enabled digital health solutions can bridge systemic gaps and offers lessons for scaling integrated care to other NCDs in low-resource settings.
| Country | Kenya |
|---|---|
| Organization | Private Sector |
