OneDokita CEO wants tech injection for healthcare sector

Nigeria should join the global healthcare technology revolution to make healthcare accessible to citizens and boost growth in the sector, Dr Daniel Folukoya, founder and CEO of OneDokita, a startup ICT based healthcare provider says. To make healthcare easily accessible to more Nigerians, the country needs to leverage technology, Folukoya said Thursday in his presentation “Innovation in the Healthcare: Nigeria Healthcare Ecosystem” delivered to attendees at the Nigeria Innovation Summit 2016 held at the Sheraton Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos. According to the OneDokita CEO, early adoption of healthcare ICT will enable the people know for instance where the nearest hospital to them is as well as other healthcare information they might need. “It should not be about few people knowing where you are or where your office is as a healthcare provider, it is necessary that more people are enabled to access you digitally through web or mobile in this modern day. By adopting healthcare ICT at OneDokita we are able to open access to healthcare, not just services but also information,” Folukoya says. [caption id="attachment_38505" align="aligncenter" width="6400"] File photo shows children in an electronic library in a Nigerian school[/caption] Entertaining questions from the press after his presentation, Folukoya explains that OneDokita is an electronic network of healthcare providers and the patients. According to him, OneDokita, which is actually made up of two arms that include the web platform and the mobile app ensures that the network is structured as a hub and a spoke model where the patients are the focus and the providers are the spokes of the wheel. “The mobile app is where the patients can access the healthcare providers, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, specialists, and they can communicate with this providers, and the web portal is where this providers can connect, communicate among themselves and also with the patients", he says. “The overall aim of OneDokita is to encourage people by providing information. We want to provide information to the people about healthcare, their health and the goal is to encourage better health seeking behaviours so that we as human beings, Nigerians especially can start to champion our health, and once you know more about your health you start to treat it the same way you treat your money and manage it properly,” Folukoya says. Asked whether Nigerians are really ready for the healthcare innovations, the OneDokita founder says that, “to an extent it’s not actually about readiness, it’s about need and Nigeria needs this and that’s the key thing that we need to focus on. We need this now and that’s the bottom line. Whether or not we are ready will not change anything. If we are not ready, we need to make them be ready because we need this.” Folukoya reckons that data generated from such healthcare ICT could be used to improve the public health of Nigerians. According to him, “it's two-fold. There is patient data which is basically information about your individual health that is confidential and remains confidential between you and your healthcare provider. And there is the other side of it, which is epidemiological data within public private partnership for example clinical data registry." Folukoya says that “if you look at, for example, the Ebola episode that we had in West Africa, contact tracing for example, someone comes in and complains of fever and diarrhea and if we have an electronic network that we are able to log this on our platform will enable you keep records for future occurrence.” [caption id="attachment_53293" align="aligncenter" width="8000"]<img class="wp-image-53293" src="http://technologytimes.ng/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/People-seen-testing-mobile-phones-at-an-event-in-Lagos.jpg" alt="Technology Times file photo shows people looking at mobile phones on display at a smartphone launch. According to the OneDokita CEO, early adoption of healthcare ICT will enable the people know for instance where the nearest hospital to them is as well as other healthcare information they might need." width="8000" height="4920" /> Technology Times file photo shows people looking at mobile phones on display at a smartphone launch. According to the OneDokita CEO, early adoption of healthcare ICT will enable the people know for instance where the nearest hospital to them is as well as other healthcare information they might need.[/caption] The OneDokita founder asks Nigerians to go to the website www.1dokita.com.ng to sign up and also sign up on the mobile app so as to be ready when the platform goes public. “The app will be available on the Google Play Store because majority of Nigerians are using Android, so the focus initially is on Android and the portal can be accessible as you can any website. You just need a username and a password which the providers can request from our service,” Folukoya says. Also making a presentation at the event, Bright Ekweremadu, MD Society for Family Health says the public health sector in Nigeria has over the time experienced an immense evolution in the use of innovative strategies and technologies in delivery of healthcare services. According to the Society for Family Health MD, the use of mobile technology in data management, contact tracing and communication and social mobilisation by Ebola alert are some of the innovations that have been employed in the Nigerian health sector. Ekweremadu told the attendees that the SFH has also under the Maternity and Neonatal Health Care Learning Project in Gombe State pioneered the use of call centres to provide access to information on maternal and neonatal as well as enhance referral to health facilities. The SFH MD says that through the call centres, life saving information is provided on 24-hour basis to guide health seeking even within the remotest parts of the state. “With the current information that Nigeria now has nearly 150 million cell phones and 88 million Internet usage, SFH will work with relevant partners to scale up this intervention and ensure that this is maximized for healthcare,” Ekweremadu says. The Nigeria Innovation Summit is an annual event organized by Emerging Media, which brings together stakeholders from different sectors of Nigeria’s economy to share trends and opportunities around technological innovations and entrepreneurship development. The event attracted top stakeholders including the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta who was represented by Tony Ojobo the NCC Director of Public Affairs, as well as participants from different sectors.

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