Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council has embarked on automation of Kenya’s licensing processes of medical doctors and dentists, oral health practitioners and health institutions. This has gone a long way in conforming to its ease-of doing business in leveraging on the benefits of technology in its business processes.
According to KMPDC’s ICT Manager Duncan Mwai, all medical and dental practitioners, oral health officers and health institutions applying for renewal of their annual practice licenses are all required to apply online through osp.kmpdc.go.ke.
“Automation is aimed at making the registration and licensing system transparent, robust and easy-to-use for medical, dental practitioners and health institutions, by reducing the turnaround time therefore improving efficiency and creating more time in patient care other than queuing for license application,” Mwai said.
He further added that this has also improved revenue to the Council and increased compliance since members of the public can verify the authenticity of the practitioners and health institutions on the publicly available registers.
“Having integrating payments via M-Pesa and bank payments, the license application process is now seamless,” says Mwai.
All registration and licensing, previously done manually, required all medical and dental practitioners to physically visit the KMPDC headquarters. Today however, only the first-time registration is done manually with the subsequent renewal of licenses all done online the OSP portal.
This move has greatly reduced the number of people visiting the Council for the service, greatly contributing to physical and social distancing measures implemented to curb the spread of COVID-19.
After the online application has been done, Mwai adds, the various registers are made available on the Council’s website on this link https://kmpdc.go.ke/registers-practitioners-php, making it easier for interested members of the public to check up and verify the practitioners’ and health institutions’ licensure status. This has also helped deal with quacks because the public can easily check and see if one is indeed a doctor or a quack.
Once the license application has been made, it becomes available on one’s online services portal, where it can be downloaded at one’s convenience.
“The licenses provided by the Council have a Quick Response (QR) Code, which can be used to verify the authenticity and validity. On verification, name of the holder, registration number, license number, a photo, practice type, qualifications and specialty are displayed” Mwai said.
“This, we hope, will help us in weeding out quacks and those operating in the country illegally,” he said, “we believe in ensuring quality healthcare for patients, and one way we do this is by protecting them patients through ensuring all medical and dental practitioners are registered and duly licensed before being allowed to practice in Kenya.”
One of the Council’s functions is to keep a practitioners’ and health facilities’ register. The register contains a list of medical and dental practitioners and health institutions and further shows their registration status, training and specialty. It helps the Council keep a record of the actual number of practitioners and health institutions and the list of specialists practicing in the country.
The register is broken down to general/dental practitioners register, senior registrar register, specialists register, register of community oral health workers, register of interns foreign practitioners register, health facilities register and medical camp register.
All practitioners are also required to enroll into integrated continuing professional development (CPD) platform and submit their CPD points online. They are required to attain a minimum of 50 CPD points per CPD calendar year (1st January to 31st December) to qualify for retention in the annual register.
The Council’s Registration and Licensing system also addresses registration of institutions; both medical training institutions, hospitals, clinics, dispensaries and health centers, licensing of interns, accreditation of internship centers, CPD Providers and virtual services providers.
“As Kenya is pursuing Universal Health Coverage by 2022 where healthcare services are going to be paid for by Insurance, the health facilities registry will also help National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) to establish the veracity of the claims as NHIF will only empanel health facilities and practitioners registered and licensed by KMPDC. These licenses are shared with NHIF on real-time basis” Mwai explained. KMPDC is also working on a solution to map all healthcare facilities in Kenya and services they offer. The mapping will be done using geo-coordinates.
