About CIN
14
Counties Across
Kenya
The Clinical Information Network (CIN) was initiated in 2013
With initial funding from Wellcome Trust as a partnership involving KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KEMRI-Wellcome), the Ministry of Health (MOH), the Kenya Paediatrics Association (KPA) through Kenya Paediatric Research Consortium (KEPRECON), and participating County Hospitals in Kenya. .
Improving Hospital Care for Children and Newborns
CIN works to support the use of information to improve hospital care for children and newborns admitted to county hospitals by building connections across the network and examining ways to implement better care. As it does this it works to further guide evidence-informed policy, and practice in hospitals in Kenya.
Our Progress
CIN began working in paediatric wards and progressed to involve newborn units which are now integral parts of the system. For each ward a paediatrician or Medical Officer and the lead nurse act as the focal persons and work together with the hospital’s Health Records Information Officers and data clerks.
The network has enabled hospitals to adopt use of:
Standardise Medical Records
Standardised admission and discharge medical records,
Generate Feedback on Hospitals
Use routine data to generate feedback on hospitals’ progress to prompt continuous improvement,
Understand Patient Outcomes
Understand patient outcomes, and to evaluate interventions.
CIN involves adoption of standardised admission (Paediatric Admission Record-PAR) and discharge medical records as routine inpatient medical records, abstraction of data from inpatient medical records into bespoke REDCap databases hosted on computers in the hospital by data clerks based at each hospital. Deidentified data are securely shared and stored on a KEMRI-Wellcome server and at multiple stages efforts are made to remove obvious data entry errors and reduce missing entries. The primary data belongs to the participating hospitals while the deidentified copy shared with KEMRI-Wellcome is processed with routine analytics to produce three-monthly audit and feedback reports that are shared with CIN partner hospitals. Hospital practices are evaluated against recommendations in national treatment guidelines (the Kenya Basic Paediatric Protocols).
Data from CIN is also used for routine observational research under governance from the KEMRI research committee and oversight from collaborating partners.
CIN Footprint Across Kenya
CIN has operations in fourteen counties across the country. The counties include: