Nigeria’s fragmented medical records system remains a major challenge for patients seeking continuous and coordinated care. Important health information is often scattered across hospitals, laboratories, paper files, phones and messaging platforms, making it difficult for patients and doctors to access a complete medical history when it matters.
Mr. William Popoola, a digital transformation entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience in technology, artificial intelligence and enterprise solutions, is seeking to address the problem through Medbankr, a digital health platform he co-founded to give patients greater control and access to their medical records.
Popoola, who is also the founder of Wow Effect Communications and has co-founded AI-focused ventures in Vietnam, including Quanskill and Quanrobotics, has worked on digital transformation initiatives across three continents. He has also been involved in helping Nigerian patients access healthcare services and international medical second opinions through MedVisit.
In this interview, Popoola explains the thinking behind Medbankr, how the platform aims to improve continuity of care, the role of AI in healthcare, data privacy and security, and his broader vision for transforming Nigeria’s healthcare system.
Excerpts:
What problem in Nigeria’s healthcare system inspired you to create Medbankr?
The moment the problem became very real to me was 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 didn’t 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.
You describe Nigeria’s healthcare system as having a continuity problem. What exactly does that mean, and how does it affect ordinary 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 is not a theoretical problem. It can mean repeated tests, missed follow-ups, confusion about medication, avoidable cost and a great deal of 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. Can you share a real-life scenario that captures the problem Medbankr was created to solve?
Imagine someone who has been managing hypertension for several years. They have blood-pressure readings from home, an old laboratory result, prescriptions from two different hospitals and a list of medicines they partly remember. Then they relocate, change provider or need to see a specialist.
At that 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 exactly 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. The user can keep the relevant reports, medication details, readings and notes in one place, then share what is appropriate when they need care. It will not make the clinical decision for the doctor. What it does is make it more likely that the doctor is starting with a clearer picture.
Why do you believe individuals should have lifelong control of their medical records rather than their health information remaining scattered across hospitals and healthcare providers?
Hospitals must maintain their own clinical records and meet their professional and legal obligations. That is important. But a patient should also be able to keep and carry a usable copy of their own health story.
People move between cities, providers, employers and stages of life. They may need an emergency consultation while away from home, change hospital or decide to seek a second opinion. If their relevant health information is locked away in separate institutions, they become dependent on a system that was not designed around their movement through life.
Lifelong control does not mean a patient edits clinical facts or replaces professional judgment. It means the person can keep their documents, understand their own timeline, decide what to upload and choose what to share.
That is the model Medbankr supports: health information that remains with the person, while care decisions remain with qualified providers.
For an ordinary Nigerian who downloads Medbankr today, what practical difference will the platform make in managing their health journey?
Medbankr gives a person one place to make sense of the parts of their health journey that are usually scattered. They can keep important medical records such as 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. A user can keep a record of the medicines they take 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 get structured, safety-conscious guidance on the next step.
This is particularly useful when preparing for a consultation, managing an ongoing condition or supporting a family member’s health journey.
The real value is that these features are connected. Medbankr can bring together the medical records a user has uploaded, the medications they have recorded, their symptom history and their vital trends to provide proactive health prompts and insights.
For example, it may encourage the user to pay attention to a pattern, keep monitoring a particular reading, update missing information or discuss something relevant with a healthcare professional.
Medbankr goes beyond storing records by introducing AI-powered health tools. What role does artificial intelligence play in the platform, and how does it support patients without replacing doctors?
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, help organise health information, identify information gaps, recognise patterns in data a user has chosen to record and prompt sensible next steps.
But we are very 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 a patient, ask follow-up questions, interpret evidence in context and be accountable for care.
Medical records are among the most sensitive information a person can have. How does Medbankr ensure that Nigerians’ health information remains private, secure and controlled by the individual?
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 means encrypted storage and transmission, restricted access, security monitoring, and clear internal procedures for how information is handled. For sensitive administrative access we use multi-factor authentication, and we keep the data we hold to the minimum we genuinely need.
Control is also central to the product. Users choose the information they upload and decide whether they want to share relevant records with a family member or healthcare provider.
Medbankr’s job is to make that sharing purposeful and secure, not to take ownership of someone’s health story.
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.
How does Medbankr improve the experience of doctors, hospitals and healthcare providers, especially in a system where professionals often make decisions with incomplete patient histories?
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 a trust, consent and governance issue. We want to build relationships that make life easier for providers without asking them to abandon the systems they already use.
Do you see Medbankr becoming a major digital health infrastructure layer for Nigeria, connecting individuals, hospitals, insurers, employers and public health programmes? What is the long-term vision?
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 three connected needs: individuals and families managing their health journey; employers, insurers, schools, associations and provider networks that need better engagement and continuity across their populations; 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.
If we do that well, Medbankr can become a meaningful continuity layer for Nigeria’s healthcare ecosystem.
If there is one thing you want every Nigerian to understand about their medical records and their health information, 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, a prescription, a scan report, a medication list and a 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. Ask questions when something is unclear.
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. Medbankr exists to make that easier.
Nigeria has a shortage of healthcare professionals and major gaps in access. Can AI genuinely make a difference in a country like Nigeria?
I believe the promise is real, and arguably more so for Nigeria than for countries with mature systems, because we have the most to gain from skipping decades of missing infrastructure.
We are already seeing it on the continent: community health workers using AI to make triage decisions with the precision of a doctor; malaria diagnostics reaching about 96% sensitivity; cervical-cancer screening in Zimbabwe that cut detection time from days to minutes; and radiology at UCH Ibadan that dropped from two days to twenty minutes.
But the technology has a precondition. AI is only as powerful as the data it can see, and Nigeria’s health data is scattered across paper, chat apps and memory. Without organised records, even the best AI is effectively working blind.
So, the opportunity and the responsibility are the same: before AI can help Nigeria, someone has to build that memory. That is what we are doing.
What makes AI especially relevant to healthcare in a developing country like Nigeria, compared with countries that already have more mature health systems?
For the Nigerian patient, the real gift of AI is turning scattered records into a complete, working memory.
When you feel unwell, a structured symptom guide walks you through organised questions and helps you understand, against your own history, what might be happening and when to seek care.
If you manage hypertension or diabetes, your blood pressure and medication data are watched over time, so problems get flagged early instead of surfacing too late.
When you do see a doctor, the relevant history is already assembled, so the consultation can focus on what matters instead of the doctor having to dig for basic facts.
Reminders are smart and personal, so adherence improves. And this matters most where specialists are scarce: the same intelligence can serve someone in a village the way it serves someone in Lagos.
AI will not replace Nigerian doctors. I believe it can help each one reach further. Today, for many families, healthcare can feel like a lottery. We want to help make it feel like a system.
AI is generating enormous excitement, but also concern. What is Medbankr’s philosophy on using it responsibly in health?
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.
We take a safety-first approach: structured inputs, conservative escalation, clinician review on the higher-risk features, clear disclosures, and firm limits on what the tool is allowed to say.
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 as it tries to build 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.
A further challenge is the nature of 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.
