Ifedamola Adefisoya, Medipal Healthcare

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and Chief Evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes we explore topics from the world of APIs, but we look at things through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have Ifedamola Adefisoya, CTO and co-founder of Medipal Healthcare. My conversation with Ifedamola opened my eyes to the front line of digitization of healthcare in Africa, and it helped me expand my understanding of how APIs can make our lives better.

Let’s start at the beginning. Who are you and what do you do?

So thank you. My name is Ifedamola. I’m a software engineer, and I own a medical record company, that’s Medipal Healthcare. And what we do, basically, is we automate the processes in hospitals. And another thing we do is we try to connect laboratories to patients, and we help them collect their samples and take them to the laboratories.

Is there a lot of digitization in the healthcare system currently, or is this a fairly new process to digitize? What’s happening?

No, digitalization, as far as I know, has been existing for a long time, and we have quite a number of innovations coming up, springing up day by day. We have AI, we have machine learning, bringing all those things into healthcare. It’s been fantastic, and it has been taking healthcare to a great height.

Yeah, it sounds like there’s a good opportunity to continue serving the patient with better healthcare with artificial intelligence and other APIs and other technologies. So are you using the cloud when you guys build your applications and offer them? Are you able to elastically scale your applications in that way?

Yeah, actually, when we started, we started very small as a small company, and we discovered at some point that we are no longer comfortable with running a shared infrastructure, then we certainly needed to move to the cloud and to upscale our services. And so far so good, we have been serving several thousands of patients and facilities within Nigeria.

Nice. What does the competition look like?

The competition, you know, most products, most softwares now, there is no monopoly, you just have to keep innovating. That’s what keeps us standing atop of the market.

Yeah, that’s why you just have to keep innovating and trying to understand ways that you can stay out ahead. What about the healthcare professionals, are they all digitally savvy, are they able to understand it, or is there education required for healthcare professionals?

Okay, actually we have some of them, the young ones, yeah, and we have the old ones among them that are trying, they have the inclination, they want to learn, they want to come into the digital phase, you understand. We have some challenges with some of those old medical practitioners. When we started, most of them have challenges with typing, so we have to improvise and offer them a voice-to-text mechanism that can really make them work faster and efficiently, because they have challenges typing. And that’s one way we could solve that, and we did that, and it was fantastic.

Yeah, it’s good to see how we can use technology to move things forward but augment human beings, and those who maybe aren’t so digitally savvy, with smart uses of technology, I would say. So what are some of the innovations and improvements that you’re looking to make on your system and how you provide services to your consumers?

All right, so one of the innovations we are working towards now, currently at this time we have successfully implemented the cloud transcribing service that transcribes text to voice and vice versa as well. And we’re also looking at bringing in chatbots, AI, some of those tasks automated using AI. And we’re also looking at several other extensions to make our platform robust and serve people better.

Is there still a lot of paper processes and physical processes to deal with?

Yeah, quite a lot of paperwork still, and we are still trying to make sure that we have a healthcare service running online without having to write papers. We can’t really eradicate people’s papers automatically, we can’t take it off automatically, but we have to just take steps to make sure that at least we reduce the number of writings.

Yeah, it’s healthcare, a pretty critical space. So how do you approach making sure that your services are reliable and tested and of a certain quality for consumers?

Okay, in our team we have a medical professional as a co-founder, and we have our board, we have an informed CMD of a very big facility as a board member. So before we push any updates or any innovation, we critically look at it at the board level and at the management level, and ensure that those things are what the users are really looking at.

Yeah, making it as reliable as possible, addressing privacy concerns amidst all of it, it’s all pretty important these days. How has COVID changed how you do business? Has it impacted, has it just made you busier, what’s changed?

COVID is really important, a lot of businesses around the world, it made people think of a way to really pivot, you understand. Because the challenges we had with these doctors, their aversion to paper, when COVID came they saw the need to start using telemedicine, consulting online, and it has really been helpful to them, and we are proud that we made it happen.

Yeah, it sounds like the silver lining in COVID is that it’s pushed organizations to change when they may have been a little slower to do so. And another area I’m seeing a lot of investment in is automation of services. So if it’s already digital, how do we automate and do more with less? Are you automating a lot of what you’re building and offering?

Yeah, we are. As a technology company, we are keen to solve problems, and the only way we can solve problems is by digitalizing these normal processes that are currently manual, and we make them automated.

Yeah, how do you keep your services supporting business? One common complaint I hear about APIs is that they’re too technical, they’re built by IT groups or developers who really don’t understand the business. So how do you keep your technology in alignment with what’s needed business-wise?

Okay, now, all we do is we should be providing APIs to our clients, or we redirect them into our service, they have their user and access to a platform, just like in a SaaS module. So we make sure that our processes, our platform, is as straightforward as possible, and that’s how we stand top in the market as well. We have a simple software that is very easy to use.

That’s good, that makes, if you can keep it simple and keep it intuitive and something people want to use, that’s important. Do you have much government involvement or oversight or regulation into what you do?

Currently in Nigeria, we have some regulations. If you’re running the software, you have to have some kind of security levels, security measures in place, and we ensure that those security procedures are considered in order to ensure that the data of our patients and of our facilities are well protected.

Do you feel like artificial intelligence is being used, machine learning, training models, what’s the purpose of artificial intelligence? Is it to replace the jobs that humans are doing right now, or is it more to add other features and capabilities on top of what humans are doing right now?

Yeah, AI is really been helpful. I remember sometimes back I worked on the medical diagnosis platform. What you just have to do is put in your symptoms and some other things, and I think it was a very good one because I used it myself personally and I have some of our team members use it. It will diagnose you and tell you, to some reasonable extent, we have like 90 percent accuracy diagnosis of whatever you have inputted on the chatbox. And AI is taking us to further greater heights, and we are keen to explore that further.

Yeah, so AI and APIs and technology, I would say a lot of times people are concerned that we’re not providing as much human interaction, we’re trying to automate and build more screens. Do you feel like the services that you’re offering is replacing human interaction, or do you think it just enables doctors to provide better human interaction with their patients?

So yeah, I would say it does both. And when you look at the speed of the telemed scene, majorly what doctors do is have one-on-one conversation with patients, and with technology we’re able to have it online. You just don’t have to have physical presence at the facility, and you get attended to.

Yeah, it’s interesting to watch how we use technology to make ourselves better, to have more conversations. I would say in COVID, I’m using technology to have more face-to-face conversations, like these conversations are how I improve my career and what I know, by learning from people like you who are doing things. And for you personally, in your job as a developer, what are your biggest challenges day to day, week to week, that you would like to solve or see evolve and change?

Okay, my biggest challenge here is still solving problems. We have a number of programs, and recently my team, we figured out that most professionals, most bankers and other white collar job personnel, people who work, they barely have time to do tests. So we looked at solving that problem, and we were able to have a solution. What we do is we collect their blood samples and we take it to the laboratory, and they get the results of the test without having to physically go to the lab. So these are some of the problems we solve. Day by day we have a lot of them, and we are still solving more problems.

Is that what keeps your job interesting, that sort of problem solving?

Yeah, yeah.

It’s one of the reasons I like APIs, is I get to not only talk about these problems but across many different industries. So today I’m doing healthcare, tomorrow I’ll be doing a different, environmental or something different. And I really like that part about my job. Where do you get your information, how do you stay learning in what you do, resources?

You know, you find information on the platforms or on the internet, you learn. And what I do is I keep learning, you know, I keep learning every day, learning, there’s no stop.

Yeah, that’s important. Is healthcare where you’re going to stay, you think, for the rest of your career?

Oh yeah, I love healthcare. The challenges that we’ve been having, I think I’ll stay in healthcare to solve my medical problems.

Yeah, well, it’s a worthy place to be solving problems. I think it’s one that you’re not going to go without a job, because I think we’re always going to need healthcare people who care and can do things. So one of the things I’m trying to do as part of the show, and LaTroy, my show assistant, has been my partner in this, has been really great in helping me do this, is we’re trying to, our audience started as United States, North America, and we’re really trying to bring in voices and people from other countries who are using technology. So what would you share with our audience, as far as maybe changing how we might see healthcare in Nigeria and Africa? What’s something you’d want to share with the rest of the world when it comes to what you do that might change opinions or how we see you?

Okay, now, right now we have a lot of talents in Nigeria, we have a lot of people doing things, solving problems, making things happen. And the healthcare space in Nigeria is a quite challenging one. There are a lot of problems, we have issues with internet facilities, we have some substandard facilities. And a lot of those things, what we have to do is we have to think of how to make those things work without internet. So our software, we are able to make sure our software runs offline as well as runs online, because internet was a very major challenge in Nigeria, currently still a challenge, because we have some remote areas, we have some places that don’t even have electricity. So basically these people still have to get good healthcare services, and we are hoping our government will do better, and hoping that we’ll have a change, changing all of these things, and better focus on the healthcare space, because it’s a very big market.

Yeah, I think from what I’ve learned, the people that I know, you’re very smart problem solvers, and tackling, working within constraints, I guess, is how I would apply it, is you’re very creative within constraints to find solutions to the problems that are right there. I actually have a new employee, a new person joining my team on Monday, from Nigeria, his name’s Debo. And Debo is going to help me with developing in Postman. We have what’s called collections, which describe different APIs and show how to do different things with APIs. And Debo is going to help me build collections. And I interviewed Debo, brought him on, and he’s super smart, very similar to you, problem solver, just really hungry to solve problems. Why is Nigeria producing such a good, interesting class of developers who are so hungry to solve these challenges?

Because we have a lot of smart people, and Nigeria, if you look at Nigeria, like Nigeria is the hope of technology in Africa. Nigeria has the top unicorns in Africa, Flutterwave is from Nigeria, we have a lot of companies, we have a lot of startups, a lot of talents, like amazing talents. So that’s why people solve problems, because there are a lot of problems to solve locally and globally, and doing that, we’re proud of that.

Yeah, no, it’s good. I mean, I’m personally taking advantage of that talent, but also we’ve had other folks on the show from Nigeria that are solving, we had a payment provider here, and so it really feels like there’s the talent that’s needed to not just continue solving problems for Nigeria or for the continent of Africa, but also as a source of talent for the rest of us to tap into and use. There’s enough to go around.

Yeah.

Well, I really appreciate you joining me today, this has been great. It’s an interesting look into healthcare in Africa. I think the opportunity for APIs is going to just continue to be pretty great on the continent because of healthcare. I think there’s a lot of, it’s just going to be endless needs. And I think there’s a lot we can learn in the US, because we have, I would say we have a lot more technical debt or legacy baggage to clean up, I think, when it comes to our healthcare system sometimes. And so I’m really interested in learning from what other people are building and doing, and I appreciate you coming by today. Thanks for sharing your story.

Thank you, thank you for having me here, it’s really nice to be here and to share my story. Thank you.

Thanks again to Ifedamola for stopping by. You can find more on him on LinkedIn, and you can learn more about Medipal Healthcare at medipalhealthcare.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.