Tijani Olatunji Heads the Operations at PrimedeHealth, an organisation that is making efforts to digitise the healthcare ecosystem in Nigeria.
The health startup is on a mission to leave an impact in the Nigeria’s Healthcare sector by providing a solution that guarantees easy access, security in data collection and storage.
The company also wants to ensure that all patients across Africa can have a unified healthcare management system that allows easy sharing of data among healthcare providers.
Its payment system will ease the completion of transactions and generate revenue to sustain and generate revenue for our clients.
Tijani Olatunji speaks to the vision anchored on using technology to create easy access to healthcare services across Africa for sharing of data among healthcare providers.
Can you provide more details about the background and motivation behind PrimedeHealth’s mission to digitise healthcare in Nigeria? What challenges or issues in the healthcare system prompted the need for digital solution?
The lack of effective digitization in our healthcare facilities presents significant risks that far exceed the benefits. When we initially embarked on the development of Medical Records, it became evident that numerous challenges were faced by patients in medical facilities.
Patients, including senior citizens were seen queuing heavily even while they needed healthcare. Other issues were ease of record keeping and retrieval, ease of making payment including privacy and security concerns. Some patients also wanted access to their records.
The management of the facilities needed to be able to easily audit their papers real time to avoid theft. They were looking for a way to create a faster way of reporting and monitoring logs while keeping proper and secured data. There was lack of data analytics and this resulted in product and drugs wastage after expiry.
The medical doctors wanted to clock in patients faster and reduce the workload and so was the nurses, radiologist and every other end user.
Our primary objectives as a technology solutions company were to address issues such as data/record availability, data security, inefficiency, and compliance. However, we had to synchronize our objectives with the problems of the available market to create a Problem-Solution-Fit.
Then we embarked on creating the indigenously built solution and our first Minimum Viable Product called eClinic.
eClinic was an Electronic Medical Records platform that was later redesigned and rebranded to our most recent solution used by various facilities across the country called SmartClinic.
We received support and backing from the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) and this in turn provided a boost in confidence as we worked towards creating an interoperable system where every stakeholder including the Patients are made important.
Can you please elaborate on the digital solutions and technologies PrimedeHealth has developed or implemented to digitise healthcare services?
For a more efficient care delivery and patient access to healthcare, the base and foundational platform we have is the SmartClinic used by end users to simplify their work. When we say ‘end users’, this refers to the Record Officers, the Nurses, the Doctors, Radiologists, Surgeons, Dentists, Opticians, Storekeepers and every other person who works in our medical facilities.
We carried out extensive market research and we created the SmartApp which is for the Patients access. On this app, patients can access their records, book appointments, contact the facility directly, make payments easily and avoid queuing.
We proceeded to create SmartCards for patients with a scan-able QR code which gives patient’s access to the SmartApp.
Then we have the SmartKiosk which is a self-service that will be manned by our staff whose main responsibility is to assist people who are not tech savvy and do not have smart phones for access to various tasks the patients want to carry out.
How have these solutions improved patient care and access to healthcare in both urban and rural areas?
With over 4 million patients on our platform registered to various medical facilities across the country, we have trained over 5,000 end users to use the SmartClinic while effectively attending to patients.
Our partnership with the Government on all levels has assisted the facilities in creating value for all stakeholders involved in the value chain.
Faster response and scheduled time have improved care delivery in all levels. Our solution has also reduced revenue loss in the facilities and created transparency due to the various logs and audit trails we have in place. Remote yet monitored actions on the platform has created a telehealth platform that enhance remote consulting between an end user (usually the doctors) and patients.
However, asides from assisting the people in rural areas in accessing healthcare, the facilities in rural areas can get healthcare the same way the facilities in the urban areas get healthcare provided they have proper infrastructure.
There are facilities in rural areas who have set up amazing infrastructure better than their counterparts in the urban regions.
All thanks to the MDs and CMDs of these facilities who undoubtedly embraced the technology infrastructure we provide and preach.
You mentioned training over 1,000 medical doctors to use digital solutions. What has been the impact of this training on healthcare delivery?
It has been particularly overwhelming. We live in a country where a lot of our medical Doctors are very enthusiastic about their jobs and delivering care to patients.
We are very hopeful that the regime of His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will make the affairs of the Medical Doctors and other care providers a top priority in ensuring we have a stable healthcare system with lesser brain drain as applied in the case of Nigeria.
Some Doctors opt in to use their personal devices and Network when they realise there is a downtime cause by the infrastructure of the facilities. This downtime can be mitigated and reduced to the barest minimum considering the intricacies of their job.
How do you ensure that healthcare professionals and patients are comfortable and proficient in using these digital tools?
We have put parameters in place. We made sure we offer comprehensive training programs which includes physical and virtual trainings, user manual in various departments, user friendly interfaces, 24/7 technical support and properly laid down feedback mechanism.
All of these create a continuous learning culture.
For patients, we made sure patient education programs are constantly being carried out by our support team. These responsibilities are vested upon the guys in the operations team.
We do not take user friendly patient portals for granted and quite a lot of patient feedback has enabled us to understand the Product-Market-Fit. The feedback also assisted us to know we had to create accessible support channels where we learnt that a lot patient were very keen on data privacy.
Managing data for over four million patients is a significant responsibility. How does PrimedeHealth prioritise data security and patient privacy?
At Primed, Data security and patient data privacy is something we take very important. However, it will be quite unreasonable for us to go into details of our hosting and data security as this will only attract intrusion attempt to us.
Can you explain how patients can access their medical records?
We have a patient app which is linked to their registered hospital. Upon registration, each patient can get into the mobile app or the web application, log in and view their records which is a constitutional right of every patient.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered during the digitisation process, and how have you addressed them?
During our pilot projects, we encountered quite a lot of challenges but like always, there are not challenges that cannot be conquered with the right approach and a great team.
Adaptation will always remain a key challenge when introducing technology to end users. Especially when you are moving from one end of the prism (Paper charts) to the other (Fully electronic tech driven solutions).
We funded quite a few projects ourselves. It is sometimes difficult getting support when building Proof of Concept. Nobody wants to know the prospects your solution carries but you however need support to make Proof of concept building easier. We were however lucky, like I said earlier to gain the trust of some few leaders who gave us the platform to deliver.
If we have end users with the right mindset and there is funding support, a lot more can be achieved very quickly. We are very grateful for support and collaborations from financial partners.
What are PrimedeHealth’s plans, especially in advancing healthcare digitisation and patient-centered care in Nigeria?
Presently we are deployed in about 40% of the Federal Government Hospitals and we aim to taking it further to 75% before year ending 2023. We will be focusing on expansion into other African Countries and the rest of the world.
To obtain a proper robust interoperable platform, the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models are presently being worked on and would be unveiled to end users, patients and every other stakeholder.
We need to enhance data collection and integration in a way that our team will be able to support facilities in a smoother and more seamless approach. When we are done training these models which of course will take some time, they will go through testing and validation.
We will also continue to monitor, evaluate and improve our processes. Partnerships and collaborations are also very important in creating a technology driven economy and we will continue to engage stakeholders.
These are steps we are carrying out to make the journey technology driven.
Ideas, partnerships and Solutions is what we live by.
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