Nigeria’s Healthcare System Needs a Digital Memory — Medbankr Founder

By Chioma Obinna

William Popoola is a digital transformation entrepreneur and co-founder of Medbankr, a digital health platform tackling Nigeria’s fragmented medical records system. With over a decade’s experience in software engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics and enterprise technology, he founded Wow Effect Communications and has supported organisations across three continents with digital transformation.

In this interview, Popoola discusses Nigeria’s medical records crisis, Medbankr’s solution and how secure digital tools and responsible artificial intelligence could improve healthcare delivery.

Excerpts

Nigeria’s healthcare system has a continuity problem. What exactly does that mean, and how does it affect Nigerians seeking care?

Continuity means that the right information should be available when a person moves from one point of care to another. A consultation today should build on what happened last month, last year or at another facility.

For many Nigerians, that continuity is missing. A scan may be with one provider, a laboratory result with another, a prescription in a WhatsApp message and blood-pressure readings in a notebook. When a person changes doctor, travels, has an emergency or needs a specialist, the history may not follow.

This can mean repeated tests, missed follow-ups, confusion about medication, avoidable costs and anxiety. It also means clinicians sometimes have to make decisions without the full context.

Medbankr is built to help people keep that context together and carry it into the next healthcare conversation.

Many Nigerians have lost hospital files, repeated medical tests or struggled to explain their medical history to new doctors. What problem is Medbankr designed to solve?

Imagine someone who has managed hypertension for several years. They have blood-pressure readings from home, an old laboratory result, prescriptions from two hospitals and a list of medicines they partly remember.

Then they relocate, change provider or need to see a specialist. At the next appointment, the clinician may have to start with fragments: What medication are you on? What was your last result? When did the symptoms begin? What changed?

The patient is trying to remember, the doctor is trying to make sense of incomplete information and time is limited.

That is the kind of problem Medbankr is designed for. Users can keep relevant reports, medication details, readings and notes in one place and share what is appropriate when they need care.

It will not make clinical decisions for doctors. What it does is make it more likely that the doctor is starting with a clearer picture.

What practical difference does Medbankr make in managing a person’s health journey?

Medbankr gives people one place to organise parts of their health journey that are usually scattered. They can keep laboratory results, prescriptions, scan reports and clinical notes in a secure personal health vault rather than searching through paper files, email or WhatsApp when they need them.

But it goes beyond document storage. Users can record medicines and set reminders, log vital readings such as blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, BMI, cholesterol and uric acid, and use guided symptom support to describe what they are experiencing and receive structured, safety-conscious guidance on the next step.

These features are connected. Medbankr can bring together uploaded medical records, medications, symptom history and vital trends to provide proactive health prompts and insights. For example, it may encourage a user to pay attention to a pattern, continue monitoring a particular reading, update missing information or discuss something relevant with a healthcare professional.

This can be particularly useful when preparing for a consultation, managing an ongoing condition or supporting a family member’s health journey.

Why should individuals have lifelong control of their medical records?

Hospitals must maintain their own clinical records and meet their professional and legal obligations. But patients should also be able to keep and carry a usable copy of their health story.

People move between cities and providers. They may need an emergency consultation away from home, change hospitals or seek a second opinion. If relevant health information is locked away in separate institutions, patients become dependent on a system that was not designed around their movement through life.

Lifelong control does not mean patients edit clinical facts or replace professional judgment. It means they can keep their documents, understand their timeline, decide what to upload and choose what to share.
That is the model Medbankr supports: health information remains with the person, while care decisions remain with qualified providers.

How does Medbankr improve the experience of doctors and healthcare providers?

The immediate value is a better-prepared patient. If someone arrives with organised reports, a medication list, relevant readings and a clear timeline, the clinician can spend less time piecing together basic facts and more time asking the questions that matter.

Medbankr is not trying to replace hospital information systems or tell doctors how to practise medicine. It is a patient-controlled continuity layer that can make relevant context easier to bring into a consultation, with the patient’s permission.

Over time, we see a broader role for secure sharing, referral visibility and navigation workflows with licensed providers and regulated care partners. But we are approaching that carefully. Interoperability in healthcare is not just a technical issue; it is also a trust, consent and governance issue.

What role does artificial intelligence play in Medbankr?

AI is useful when it helps turn scattered information into something clearer and more actionable. At Medbankr, we use it as an assistive layer to guide people through structured symptom inputs, organise health information, identify information gaps, recognise patterns in data users choose to record and prompt sensible next steps.

But we are clear about what AI should not do. Medbankr is not an AI doctor. It does not diagnose disease, prescribe medication or take responsibility for treatment decisions.

Those decisions belong with licensed clinicians who can examine patients, ask follow-up questions, interpret evidence in context and be accountable for care.

Nigeria has a shortage of healthcare professionals and major gaps in access. Can AI genuinely make a difference?

I believe the promise is real, particularly because Nigeria has the opportunity to address some of its infrastructure gaps with technology.

But AI has a precondition: it is only as powerful as the data it can see. Nigeria’s health data is scattered across paper, chat apps and memory. Without organised records, even the best AI is effectively working blind.

For the Nigerian patient, the opportunity is turning scattered records into a complete, working memory. When someone feels unwell, a structured symptom guide can help organise the information and indicate when to seek care.

For people managing conditions such as hypertension or diabetes, their readings and medication data can be tracked over time. When they see a doctor, the relevant history is already assembled, allowing the consultation to focus on what matters.

AI will not replace Nigerian doctors. I believe it can help each one reach further.

How does Medbankr ensure that Nigerians’ health information remains private and secure?

We treat health information as a serious responsibility, not simply as data. Medbankr has been built around privacy, security and user control from the outset.

That includes encrypted storage and transmission, restricted access, security monitoring and clear internal procedures for handling information. For sensitive administrative access, we use multi-factor authentication and keep the data we hold to the minimum we genuinely need.

Users choose the information they upload and decide whether to share relevant records with a family member or healthcare provider.

No responsible technology company should promise that security is ever finished. It requires continuous work. We are building governance, vendor review, incident-response processes and privacy controls into the platform because trust will determine whether a product like Medbankr succeeds.

Do you see Medbankr becoming a major digital health infrastructure layer for Nigeria?

Yes, that is the long-term ambition, but it has to be earned through usefulness and trust.
We are beginning with the individual: helping people organise their health information, stay engaged with their care and move through the system with more context.

From there, the same continuity foundation can serve individuals and families, employers, insurers, schools, associations and provider networks, and, over time, public-interest programmes that need tools for enrolment, communication, referral visibility, follow-up and reporting.

The important point is that we are not trying to centralise power over people’s health data. We are building infrastructure that allows people to retain control while making it easier for the right information to be available, with consent, at the right time.

What inspired you to create Medbankr?

The problem became very real to me during a conversation with a schoolteacher who was preparing to travel abroad for late-stage cancer treatment. She was trying to reconstruct years of her health history from old files, results, prescriptions and conversations.

At one point, she said something that stayed with me: if those earlier results had been in one place, someone might have seen the full pattern sooner.

I did not tell that story to blame any particular doctor or hospital. Nigeria has many dedicated clinicians working under enormous pressure. The deeper issue is that important health information often does not travel with the person. It gets left in different hospitals, laboratories, phones, WhatsApp chats and folders at home.

That conversation is really where Medbankr comes from. People should not have to rebuild their health story from scratch every time they need care.

If there is one thing you want every Nigerian to understand about their medical records, what would it be?

Your health information is part of your care. It is not just paperwork to collect after an appointment and forget in a drawer.

A test result, prescription, scan report, medication list and record of important vital readings can all matter later. Keep them. Know where they are. Take them with you when you see a new provider.

This is not about asking people to become their own doctors. It is about helping them participate more confidently in their care. The more complete the story available to a patient and their clinician, the better the conversation can be.

What is Medbankr’s philosophy on using AI responsibly in healthcare?

Our philosophy is simple: the more sensitive the decision, the more careful the system must be.
Health is not a space for unconstrained automation. A platform should not make people believe that a fluent answer is the same thing as medical judgment.

That is why Medbankr is built around clear boundaries: no diagnosis, no prescribing and no attempt to substitute for a licensed clinician.

AI should help people organise information, recognise when something may need attention and prepare for the right conversation. It should never encourage harmful delay, false certainty or self-treatment.
The test for us is not whether AI can say something impressive. The test is whether it helps a person take a safer, more appropriate next step.

What are the biggest challenges Medbankr faces in building trust and adoption in Nigeria?

The first challenge is trust. People are rightly careful about their health information. We have to show, through the product and our conduct, that privacy, security and user control are not afterthoughts.

The second challenge is habit. Many people have spent years managing records through paper files, family WhatsApp groups and memory. A new tool has to be simple enough to fit into real life before it can become useful over the long term.

Another challenge is the health system itself. Providers, laboratories, pharmacies, insurers and public programmes all operate differently. Building meaningful continuity across that environment requires patience, strong governance and partnerships.

We do not expect to solve every interoperability problem overnight. Our approach is to start with a useful user experience, learn quickly and expand carefully where trust and value are clear.