• Seek adoption of electronic medical records to improve efficiency

Health and technology experts have urged stakeholders to sustain innovation and develop practical solutions to address Nigeria’s healthcare challenges, particularly gaps in access, affordability, health insurance and patient information management.

They also called on the Federal Government to expand opportunities for more operators to participate in the health insurance sector and promote wider coverage, while urging authorities to make the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) mandatory across healthcare facilities to improve the efficiency and coordination of care.

The experts made the call at MedVerge 2.0, a healthtech event organised by HelpMum Africa in collaboration with Dobic Health and SmartMRS. The event brought together industry leaders, innovators and other stakeholders to discuss healthcare innovations and the role of technology in improving healthcare delivery.

The Convener of MedVerge 2.0 and Founder of HelpMum Africa, Dobic Health and SmartMRS, Dr Abiodun Adereni, said Nigeria needed more innovators who could identify real-life healthcare problems and develop solutions that meet the needs of the population.

Adereni cautioned innovators against developing technologies simply because they were fashionable, particularly artificial intelligence, saying developers should first identify the problems their solutions were intended to address.

According to him, sustainable innovation required solutions that could address genuine needs while also remaining financially viable.

On healthcare financing, Adereni urged the Federal Government to create an enabling environment for more players to enter the health insurance sector and expand coverage.

He said wider health insurance coverage would help more Nigerians access healthcare services and could contribute to the attainment of Universal Health Coverage.

Adereni said health insurance could make healthcare more affordable, citing his experience at Dobic Health, where he said patients could access some healthcare services at substantially lower prices.

He further advocated government-supported health insurance plans for vulnerable populations, saying people who could not afford healthcare should be given access to selected healthcare facilities and basic health checks.

He said such interventions could improve access and help reduce deaths from preventable conditions.

Adereni called for the mandatory digitalisation of healthcare records across the country, saying electronic medical records would make patient information more accessible and facilitate the exchange of records among healthcare providers.

“Nigeria should prioritise and ensure that healthcare records can be accessible to everybody and to hospitals. The government should make it mandatory for all healthcare facility providers to digitalise their processes so that healthcare records can be seamlessly exchanged between healthcare providers, and they can be able to have access to records too,” he said.

Also, the Product Manager at HelpMum Africa, Nwabueze Ifeoma, said the organisations behind MedVerge were using technology to develop solutions targeting maternal and infant healthcare, vaccination and pregnancy-related information.

She said HelpMum’s innovations included Structify AI, which she said was designed to help community health workers assess pregnant women according to their level of risk and facilitate timely intervention.

Ifeoma also highlighted Vaxbot and VaxAI, which she said were designed to provide information on vaccination and address misconceptions surrounding vaccines.

She said VaxAI could allow mothers to communicate in their own languages and receive responses in the same language, while the organisation was working on an automatic speech recognition system that would enable mothers who could not read or write to interact with the chatbot through speech.

She added that MamaBot and MamaBotAI were designed to provide answers to questions relating to pregnancy.

Lead Research and AI Innovation, Adewuyi Ayomide, explained that AI models needed to undergo evaluation after training to assess their performance, safety and ability to handle changing clinical scenarios.

He said MamaBench was designed to test whether AI models could recognise changes in patient information and update their reasoning instead of remaining fixed on an earlier diagnosis.

According to him, the researchers tested the benchmark on different AI models and developed an algorithmic technique intended to reduce failure rates associated with what they described as “diagnosis fixation.”

He said the benchmark had been made open-source to enable other researchers working in maternal and paediatric healthcare to evaluate their AI models and identify areas requiring improvement.

The Chief Technology Officer at the organisation, Oguntuase Oluwasegun, said MedVerge was aimed at bringing healthcare and technology together to develop innovations that could benefit mothers and caregivers while also automating clinical operational workflows.

Oluwasegun said technology developers needed to prioritise safety and ethics in the deployment of AI in healthcare. He said stakeholders should work together to develop safer AI products, adding that continued improvement could make the technology more accurate and beneficial to a wider population.