The challenge
The hospital group had grown by acquisition. Each acquired facility had its own patient-management system — one on a proprietary legacy platform, one on an on-premises open-source EMR, one on spreadsheets. Clinicians at the group's flagship Nairobi campus had no reliable view of a patient's history at a sister branch 40 kilometres away. NHIF reimbursement reconciliation was taking the billing team five days per month per branch.
The group's medical director had two non-negotiable constraints: no system downtime during the migration (the ICU and maternity ward couldn't go offline), and no patient history could be lost or corrupted in the transition. A previous IT team had attempted a consolidation two years earlier and abandoned it after corrupting 2,300 records during a test migration.
What we did
We spent the first six weeks doing something the previous IT team had skipped: a full data-quality audit. We profiled every table across all three source systems, identified duplicate patient records (8,400 across branches), mapped terminology mismatches (ICD-10 versions differed), and built a deterministic matching algorithm that resolved ambiguity before any data moved.
Migration was staged branch by branch, always in the small hours of a weekend, with a rollback window kept open until the morning handover. Clinical staff ran parallel charting on both old and new systems for the first 72 hours of each branch go-live. The ICU and maternity ward were last, and their go-live weekend had three Arton engineers on-site through the night.
NHIF integration was built alongside the migration, not after. We worked directly with the NHIF technical team to map their claims schema to the new EMR, and tested live claims through the portal before any branch went live. The billing team saw their monthly reconciliation shrink from five days per branch to four hours.
Technical approach
The target system was an open-standards EMR extended with a custom module for NHIF's electronic claims format and a mobile nursing-station app for ward rounds. All data was encrypted at rest and in transit, with role-based access by department, branch, and staff grade. The integration layer used a FHIR R4 API so future integrations (lab, pharmacy, diagnostics) could be added without touching the core.
"Eight branches, one record, no downtime. Arton's team delivered what two previous vendors said was technically impossible on our timeline."