Meet our Human of Healthtech 2.0

As it is our tradition to showcase trailblazers changing the face of healthcare in Nigeria ,we bring to you an outstanding young Man challenging the Status quo in Nigeria’s HealthTech space.

Victor Emaye is the team lead at Medipal Healthcare and here is our interview with him . Enjoy!!

Please kindly introduce yourself, what you do and how you started Medipal:

My name is Victor Emaye and I lead the team at MediPal HealthCare. Before I go into what the company does I have a background in Economics and I finished from Adekunle Ajasin University in Ondo State,Nigeria. The bulk of my team members are also from the same school. We started this company on paper about 6 years ago and it was launched last year.

What Medipal does is that it helps hospitals automate their processes and digitize medical records. The goal is to ensure that patients have access to medical practitioners with very few clicks. I would like to give you a sort of rundown to why we did this. Six years ago I nearly lost my life in school. I went to the University health center and I could not get access to health care because of the amount of crowd that were waiting to be attended to. At the time they could not find my medical records so they just went on to the next patient, so I had to go home. I ended up self-medicating and bought a wrong drug from the pharmacy and ended up having complications.

At that point I said to myself that if I survive this, I will solve this problem. It took a while to get the team together, the tech teams, software engineers, operations lead and so on and so forth. After I finished school and got a bit of professional experience in the professional space, I launched my company. So this is like the journey so far. Laughs

Tell us more about the company and the progress thus far

You know the EMR space is not new. Five years ago some people already started solving the problem but guess what, they are not doing it to ensure inclusiveness because you will notice that affordability is key especially in a tech solution driven by data and cloud based activities. You would discover that it is expensive to run such solution thereby making it more expensive to afford. The price of electronic medical records is actually increased ,and only accessible to just those that can afford it. Even in the past five years you would not believe we do not have up to 2,000 hospitals currently digitized in the country. It’s a very big challenge.

Even the foremost EMR company in Nigeria today has just about 300 hospitals. And the have been in existence for about 4 years. So you can see that of the 20,000 hospitals we have in Nigeria today, we have a long way to go. So one of the things that we did when we came into the scene was to do a very rigid need-assessment analysis, I mean very in-depth. We had to go down to the grassroots and look at the hospital within. We found that they were big hospitals and, permit me to use this word “mushroom hospitals” and we had to go down to these hospitals.

So the first Hospital, the pilot Hospital is a grassroots hospital in Isolo. Isolo sounds popular yeah, but there are infrastructural challenges that makes life tough for its residents. And most of them resort to traditional health care providers. And they also use traditional birth attendants and family traditional medicine. All of this makes it a lot more tedious especially when they have complications and they need to be transferred to the hospital. So you pretty much hear them say they don’t want to go to the hospital because of the high cost of getting care and also the quality of care you get for instance when you get to the hospital you’d have to wait for like 2 hours. this is a very big Challenge for them.

So what we did was to bring the prices down, make it relatively less expensive. So what we resorted to was a 500 Naira annual subscription per patient. This means that once a hospital sees an average of 100 patients in a month, the hundred patients would have paid 500 naira for the care that they will receive throughout the year. From one hospital we get subscriptions as high as 50,000 monthly or sixty- seventy- eighty thousand Naira monthly making a total of about 600,000 or 700,000 yearly per hospital facility. Meanwhile because of the way we have broken down the billing system it has helped us in the past one year. So it’s not like you’re saying bring 1 million naira or bring 1.5 million naira ,this has enabled several hospital facilities that had never dreamt of going digital.

One of the things we actually did when we started was we partnered with the Netherlands consulate so we were being funded by them when we launched early last year.

How many hospital do you have on board now using your Digital app?

26 across six states

Wow. Tell us three challenges you have faced so far.

One of the challenges is that some hospitals actually feel that the package is too good to be true so we get questions like are there other hidden charges? For us ,the goal is to reach 1,000 hospitals in a few years. We just want to see that several of these hospitals are digitized and the little we get from the hospital or their patients counts because the more the hospitals the more the revenue for us. So some of them actually believe that this could not be true.

Another challenge we also had when we started was adaptability of the solution. It was a very major one because in areas with poor infrastructure they have auxiliary nurses ,they do not usually have professionals so to speak. So we had to do some in-depth training for them as part of the onboarding process. We had general trainings and one-on-one training. We had to teach them how to use laptops or tablets to provide care for patients. It’s actually a lot faster but when they started first it was a bit sluggish because they were trying to adapt to using the equipment.

But after the first week of the onboarding process they got used to it. So we had to create processes across those Communities to be able to solve some of these challenges. And one of the areas that we have actually achieved progress is gender equality. It is easier to see men that are very conversant with technology. As many of the nurses are women, that enabling environment helped many of them to learn.

The third one is of course raising funds. Building something like this requires a lot of funds and in the Nigerian ecosystem to a large extent, the Tech communities have tried to create pathways to which hubs like ours can raise funds from venture capitalism to Grant funding. I think the bulk of last year, we won 3 grants and also got an Indian investor. It was a great year for us starting out but of course we are also supporting hospitals with gadgets.

Another challenge is that hospitals have to invest heavily in buying laptops, tablets and internet routers for their own facilities and one of those things we did was that in our first 15 hospitals we actually donated gadgets to them while they paid in bits. Some of them have not finished paying but we have hospitals that are with us for over a year now. So it’s a great match and we don’t easily loose clients, we have a great customer support. But of course it was difficult for a lot of hospitals to buy gadget so we just invested the bulk of the money we were raising into some of these hospitals. And the first hospital serves as a testimony for ones that were interested, so they gave us a head way that our software is efficient with great features. Oh and we have great features even more than several EMRs in the market

We actually had to take over some EMRs. The first hospital that was built in Nigeria, Sacred Heart Hospital, they are currently enrolled with us since January. Ours is all encompassing you can create as many departments and add as many doctors that you like. And the good thing is that we are actually doing a South African supply I think in about two months.

This is awesome.

Yes it has everything that a hospital needs to run from finance to patient management. We have automated lab template on the platform.

What advice will you give anyone interested in building a healthtech startup?

My advice for startups that want to go into the health tech space, one key attribute you need to process is resilience. This space is not for the soft-hearted or feeble-hearted. There are times where you would want to stop. There was a time in November last year I thought my company was going to crumble. I had to make some consultations here and there before I got back on my feet. It was like nothing happened.

Then there are server issues. Currently we don’t host with any Nigerian third-party server. My advice is that anything you’ll be doing do it such that it lasts for a long time and they are sustainable. We had to invest in dollars last year to keep our solution running. You would recall that it took me five years to start. My biggest achievement this year is that we would be expanding to South Africa. It’s not an easy journey but I encourage you all to keep going.

I have a few more questions for you. Aside from work ,what do you do for fun?

I do music, I sing, and I play musical instruments.

Ok my last question ,looking back at health tech in Nigeria how far have we gone? Do you think that we are moving forward or we’re laid back? In retrospect how do you see the health tech in Nigeria?

I think great Solutions are emerging, yeah. I have seen a lot of them and some of them use drones to supply medicine in different areas across the country. So there’s a whole lot of solutions and I know that with time the solutions will be able to scale so that they are adopted by the general populace. You will discover that not everybody knows about the Solutions.

Now permit me to compare the healthcare sector to the fintech sector. You would discover that when fintech started, it was not very popular and one of those things they were talking about was financial inclusiveness, they just wanted everybody in both urban and rural areas to become financially inclusive, to know about how they could get access to loans, get access to funding, get access to resources financially, from someone close to them next door, from POS outlet to agents nearby, even without travelling down to the bank. It became popular over the years over the past five, six, seven years. Same thing with the Healthtech sector.

The health tech Space is not what it was two years ago. I think there’s been some form of improvement. Same thing with educational sector. What it was then it’s not what it is now. Do you know what the underlying Factor is? The pandemic! And it actually open the eyes of many Healthcare stakeholders to the need for technology in the health space. So right now there lots of Solutions that people are currently adapting to their Healthcare facilities, to their healthcare processes and of course it’s going to take a while but I think we are not doing badly. I just feel there’s a need for more innovation in the health space.

For example you can imagine another companies starting the exact thing I’m doing, no innovation. It doesn’t make sense. So when we started we first started with a change of model. It singled us out of the entire market. We started with a new strategy and now we are doing exciting features that are different from what was available. We have features like when a patient is being scheduled with a doctor the doctor get an invoice notification like “ hi doctor one patient is waiting to see you”. So we had that and all the other Solutions did not have that, we just thought out of the box like we want this thing to be more engaging to the patients and doctors. I think there’s a lot more to be done in terms of Solutions.

One of the things we are doing now is biometrics and we’re partnering with Identity Day to do that. It’s like a verification process for patients. You know that when you get to the hospital, before the tech solution came on board, they would have to go look for your file. Now with our tech solution they simply need to just type in your name or your card number. However with biometric solution you simply need to just put in your thumbprint and your file just pops up. Now that’s another level.

In the case of emergency you’re not meant to ask the patient what’s your card number but a biometrics can easily be taken. So even if a patient is unconscious you just need to take a thumb print and it can get access to the patient file. We need a lot of innovative men and women in this sector to ensure that these problems are truly being solved. It’s not just about creating Solutions,… it’s about creating Solutions that people can run with.

So that’s like what the health sector needs and I know that in another 5 years (laughs) I think Nigeria will be better with the health tech community. A lot of facilities would have been digitized, a lot of processes would have been synchronized. I’m trusting that the government to put the right policies in place to ensure that we have single database system, but that’s going to take a lot. I know that things will get better with universal solution like ours and with others out there. Thank you.

We hope you had an amazing time reading our interview with Victor.

To learn more about Medipal Healthcare ,follow them on their social media platforms : Instagram- @medipalhealthcare , Twitter — @medipalhlthcare , LinkedIn- Medipalhealthcare

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Thank you!! Watch out for our next episode!!