Johns Hopkins grad from Nigeria wants to help hospitals in West Africa go digital

Though paper-based health care is a thing of the past for many hospitals and clinics around the world, in West Africa it's still the dominant standard.

Adegoke Olubusi wants to change that.

The tech entrepreneur, a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, started OneMedical to help hospitals in West Africa go digital. His team has already begun that process in Nigeria, partnering with more than a dozen hospitals.

Now OneMedical is looking at big opportunity for new funding: the Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge. The team is one of 15 finalists in the digital innovation challenge, which includes a $10,000 People's Choice Award open for votes through June 28.

Olubusi, who was born and raised in Nigeria before moving to Maryland for school about a decade ago, has visited his home country often in recent years to work on tech projects like KingsChat, a leading social media platform in Africa.

When his work brought him to hospitals, Olubusi says he found "chaos" in their record-keeping, complicating everything from patient data and billing to inventory. "It's all on paper—it's messy, inefficient, and there's no way to analyze the data," he says.

But in launching a startup to address these problems, he and his team knew they couldn't simply transplant U.S. standards into hospitals that had never used electronic records before.

Image caption: The training interface of OneMedical

"We thought, 'How can we make something simple and easy to adopt for hospitals to operate more efficiently?'" says Olubusi, who has also previously worked as an analyst for eBay, PayPal, and Goldman Sachs.

So he and his team—including rising Johns Hopkins junior Sami Ayele—sat down with health care workers in Nigeria to develop prototypes.

"Eventually that turned into an actual idea for a business, and a concept that a lot of people loved," Olubusi says.

OneMedical offers a user-friendly platform to help hospitals simplify records and streamline processes, with the goal of improving both quality of care and profit margins. It includes a searchable database of patient records, along with features for tracking finances, staff, and medical supplies. The system runs offline at hospitals and syncs to the cloud when there's an Internet connection available, and it's accessible through any smart device or operating system.

Hospitals partnering with OneMedical in this early stage are seeing results such as shorter patient wait times and decreased workload for medical staff, the team says. Meanwhile, a waitlist is growing, with more than 25 facilities in Nigeria hoping to get on board.

OneMedical aspires to reach 125 facilities within the next year, ultimately fanning out to other parts of West Africa. The startup is currently part of the Y Combinator accelerator program and last year won Etisalat's Innovation Award.

Now, with the Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge, the team is vying for a shot at a $100,000 grand prize, among other possibilities. OneMedical stood out from the more than 1,000 startups applying to land in the finals of the global competition, which seeks digital solutions to tackle economic, social, and environmental challenges.

OneMedical's entry for Cisco's $10,000 People's Choice award includes a video pitch from Olubusi and partner Nick Moore. Votes from the public can be cast online through June 28, and Cisco will announce the winners from all categories on June 29.

OneMedical can be reached at team@onemedical.ng.