Ask three vendors whether their system "works with SHA" and you'll get three confident yeses. The question that actually matters is narrower: is the software DHA HMIS-certified? Because without that, no facility running it can be paid by SHA — however good the demo looked.
Here's the plain version for a Level 2–3 clinic or a pharmacy.
What the DHA is
The Digital Health Agency (DHA) is the body set up under the Digital Health Act to run Kenya's national health-data rails — the registries, the health information exchange, and the pipes that carry a claim from your facility to the Social Health Authority (SHA). Taifa Care sits on top of those rails.
For a facility, the DHA matters in one specific way: it decides which health management information systems (HMIS) are allowed to connect. That approval is HMIS certification.
Why certification is the gate
SHA claims aren't a paper form or an email. A paid visit becomes a structured FHIR bundle — coded diagnosis, encounter, the claim lines — submitted through the DHA's API. To send on that rail, the software has to be certified: proven to produce valid bundles, handle patient identity and consent correctly, and keep data where it's supposed to be.
So the chain is simple, and it only runs one way:
No DHA HMIS certification → your software can't submit to the rail → your facility can't be SHA-contracted → you can't bill SHA.
It doesn't matter how many SHA features a brochure lists. If the system isn't certified, none of them reach SHA.
Whose job is it — yours or the vendor's?
Both, at different layers:
- The vendor certifies the software. Getting the HMIS through DHA certification is the software company's job, not yours. It's a real process with a real queue — which is exactly why it should already be underway before you're asked to depend on it.
- The facility gets contracted. Registration and empanelment with SHA, and contracting for the funds you provide, is yours — done on a certified system.
Ask a prospective vendor where they are in the DHA process, and treat "we're certified" and "we're in the certification process" as very different answers from "it supports SHA."
Why cash-first buys you the time
Here's the reassuring part: most small private facilities are cash-only today, and certification is a process you don't control the timing of. So the sequence that de-risks you isn't "wait for certification, then digitise" — it's the reverse.
Go digital now for the value you already get — one patient record, stock that doesn't expire, M-Pesa and cash that reconcile, an eTIMS invoice on every sale — on a system that is built to certify. When certification and your contracting land, SHA claims switch on from the same records. You don't start over, and you weren't paying for paper while you waited.
That's the whole design idea behind Salus: cash-first today, SHA-ready underneath. Our SHA, M-Pesa and eTIMS rails run on synthetic data until we're certified and credentialed — then they go live without changing a screen you already use.