Ethiopia’s Health Ministry Onboards DFS Players on Digital Health Ambition

Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health has entered into a service-level agreement with eight digital financial service (DFS) providers as part of its national digital health strategy. The agreements signed yesterday were facilitated with the support of the Finance Ministry, the National Bank of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Health Insurance Service, and the Better Than Cash Alliance.

The initiative aims to serve as the first step in digitizing the health sector through the provision of coordinated national payment use cases in the health sector.

The agreements entail the initialization of digital payment capacities across all public hospitals and ultimately health service centers and includes players like telebirr and Mpesa alongside banks like the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Tsedey Bank, Oromia Bank, and the Cooperative Bank of Oromia (CooP).

Mekdes Daba (M.D), Minister of Health, underscored the importance of digitization to bring about transparency, accountability, and comprehensive improvements in health care.

“The agreements allow us to apply existing digital strides to the health sector,” Mekdes noted.

Nael Hailemariam, Co-founder and CEO of Chapa Financial Technologies, says the agreement presents an ideal opportunity to leverage technology for improved health care. He highlighted the potential to introduce an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in addition to payment capabilities as a significant development.

“Redundancy of medical records can easily be avoided,” Nael told Shega.

The Ministry’s Digital Health Blueprint envisions the overall organization and application of information, communication, technology for the service delivery, application development, and infrastructure improvement of the health sector. Digital performance management for health professionals, remote health care, digital health payments and data exchange across systems were some of the objectives.