The Journey to Universal Health Coverage: Learning from Kenya's Pilot Programmes

In 2018, the government of Kenya launched a pilot universal health coverage (UHC) programme in 4 of its 47 counties, enabling access to health services for millions of people. UHC will be scaled up across the country based on learnings from the pilot, and reforms will be made to the national hospital insurance fund in order to establish a mandatory universal health coverage scheme. The case allows for a discussion of the design and execution of a UHC programme through the lenses of operational excellence and strategy execution.

The case can be used in service operations, health care and health policy courses. It can be used to support the following teaching objectives: designing a UHC pilot, including identifying the target population and determining what services to cover; aligning incentives between local and national stakeholders, and establishing mechanisms for communication to share best practices across clinics and counties; how to develop, measure and improve key processes to enable the transition from strategy to successful implementation; how to incorporate learnings from the pilots to adapt the national framework; and discussion of ways in which the programme design and approach in a public sector setting compares to that in a corporate setting.