Podcast transcript: Episode 5 - Mind the Gap – Raising Healthcare Standards in Nigeria

Transcript

Host: Good Morning and welcome to the Experience Pod, my name is Dr. Damola Oladosu and I work on the Disruption Team here at the PwC Experience Centre. The Experience pod is a one-on-one interviewer-led podcast that discusses the adoption and utilisation of relevant emerging technologies and trends. This podcast is focused on impact-oriented professionals, researchers, developers, and even students who demand realistic and thought-provoking perspectives on the opportunities and challenges presented by disruption in our unique environment. In this episode, we are exploring how technology is being adopted to improve healthcare delivery in Nigeria. Today we have with us Mr. Adegoke Olubusi, the CEO of Helium Health and we’ll be discussing with him the approach to digitising hospital medical records in Nigeria. Goke thank you for coming today.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Very happy to be here and to share more about our amazing work in healthcare across Nigeria.

Host: Great, great. So we’ll go right into it. An important part of delivering healthcare diagnosis and analysis lies in record keeping. And as of today, I think you would agree with me that most of our records are manual and are not easily tracked or analysed, and definitely not interoperable. So at what point did you decide to solve this problem and what has progress been like for your company?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Thank you so much for that question. So I think the point that led myself and co-founders to say we are definitely going to spend the next five, ten, fifteen years tackling this singular challenge of improving healthcare delivery across Nigeria and Africa using technology and data is when we realise how little attention people are paying to it. There was this trend a few years ago where more FinTech companies were being started and even fewer healthcare technology attempts were being started. So you can see that innovators, creative people, technologists, and developers were not thinking about healthcare, they were looking at where the money was at. And when you look at the state of healthcare across the continent and how it has declined year on year. And the many challenges that just plague the ecosystem and how it directly impacts every single one of us. You start to wonder, at what point do people ask if is anyone going to solve this problem?

Host: Is anyone going to care?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly. And it’s even worse because you have less, you know. In a market where there is no data on the sector or no reliable data source, you have fewer international investors or less investment, or less money flowing in because no one wants to put their money into what they don’t understand. And when you look at the cycle of aid money that is coming to the continent through healthcare. You know, the way it’s been poorly tracked, poorly managed, you just see that the future does not look bright. So when we realised that so many people weren't paying attention to this, and it was a problem that was affecting us all, we said okay, this was worth us devoting the next ten to twenty years of our lives to, because you know the life cycle of a technology company would easily take five to ten years to get it to a very good point and we had to make that decision. It was when we saw that people weren’t paying attention to it and it was such a deep problem that cut across society. Regardless of what tier of society you’re in, you’re impacted by the state of healthcare, the lack of it, you know, accessible or trustworthy care, the lack of accountability in the system. All these things affect us directly or indirectly and we decided that we are going to drive that future. So in fact, we always saw it as healthcare at one point or the other, inevitably it would be digital, would be technology, and data-driven. So our initial motto and mission of the Company were to accelerate or catalyse that inevitable transition of our Country from paper-based manual systems to a technology and data-driven system.

Host: And so in implementing these solutions at hospitals, have your clients seen any quick wins? Have you seen any I guess like tangible results from these implementations?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. So one of the favourite things about our implementation processes, how quickly people start to realise is that it makes sense. That's the most beautiful part of the process. In fact, we didn't realise it until we saw hundreds of clients give us feedback on this and saw their reaction to it. There are two factors that I'll point out here first being since we started and launched the platform, a launch that I think we're now close to 150 locations that we have. 

Host: Sorry, are these all private hospitals? 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Almost a supermajority of them are private facilities and the public ones are typically public-private partnerships. And not mostly not direct partnerships with the government in that sense. And these are people who use the platform not because of any mandates from anyone, but because it makes their life easy. And the point I was going to make first was that we've had zero churns since we started. So every facility that has gone live with our platform, deployed the system and starts to use it end to end because that's a requirement we have. You need to use it from when the patient walks in, so when there are claims on submissions being made after has stayed on the platform. That's when we realised that it has to work. 

Host: Then it’s a no-brainer. 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi:  And it helps become a no-brainer, you know because there's a repetitive nature of the work that medical professionals do in the hospital. If you are a front desk person, you are checking in patients, and you're giving them relevant information. If you are a nurse, he or she is taking vitals, administering medications, and delivering instructions, they do that 50, 100 times, 200 times a day. Once you start doing that on a digital system, you even start thinking about the shortcuts. There are the ones who even tell you. And that’s one of the things that make it easy, once you've done it for a full day, you'd be amazed. Healthcare professionals are somewhat people who you know, they're always on their feeds, right? They work an incredible number of hours. Once you've done it for a full day, the next day, there's nothing for us to teach you because the things you’re doing tomorrow are the same, right? The same thing with the doctors, once they've finished an encounter or during their encounter, they recorded the encounter and submitted it. And they're like they even start thinking short. They are the ones who even tell us things like you know what, I'm always prescribing these three groups of drugs, why don't we start automatically grouping them. So then we now start doing AI-related things, Machine Learning-related things that make it faster, because now they're thinking how can this even make it faster? Once they've done that, the idea of going back to a slower paper system. So it's like a drug, one of our market entry tactics, also is looking at identifying more countries across the continent, because we're also in Ghana, and Liberia, and now we’re expanding. Oh, yes, is looking at more places with no penetration and then giving them this taste of addiction.

Host: So it’s like giving them a free trial for some time.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely, one of our pricing models enables people's pay per patient. And what we said was a lot of people have had bad experiences with different vendors and medical records in general. In fact, when you think globally, medical record software has an average negative 75 NPS score. No one likes their EMR software, just around the whole world, from Harvard to Stanford, you know, no one likes it. Just because it's a legacy system. It's because of the same reason once people start to use them, even if they're bad, they just stick to it. The process of data transitioning, and also because it's a hospital, works 24/7.

Host: Yes, you don't have a break.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly. You don't have the opportunity to say that we are going to take two weeks to six weeks to transition, like what's going to happen? So because of that people typically have a negative experience, we've had the opposite. And we built specifically around that because we want it to be able to scale.

Host: And do you tailor the solution to hospitals? Or is it a size that fits all?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. The platform itself is fully customizable. So they get to select the modules that pertain to them. They get to do things like implement rules, we have a rules-based system where they create the logic around their hospitals. There are facilities where people pay before they even see anyone, like before anyone can even attend to you or take your vitals. There are places where people pay at every step. I don’t know if you’ve been in such hospitals. You pay to register, you pay to see the doctor and then you pay before they take your blood. So you do it like four times. So we saw that there were so many different options on how people run their hospitals. So we said, You know what, we're going to build a fully customizable system, and that is flexible. That way people are just setting the rules on what they want and their experiences. So when they see it, they think we built it specifically for them, but they're not the only ones.

Host: So you talked a bit about how most of your clients are private sector hospitals, are you looking to do more with government hospitals, because I imagined that for most of the lower-income population in Nigeria, the primary point of care is still either at a pharmacy or government hospitals. So what are you doing in that regard,

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: You make a very valid point, a lot of care happens offline, off record. at pharmacies. There's a cultural aspect of it where Nigerians because people don't think you know. Generally in healthcare as well and not just for Nigerians. But there's also the Nigerian factor where people don't think of health care from a preventive standpoint.

Host: We prevent with prayer.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: No one wants to pay for a preventive system or check themselves for anything until they’ve gone to the pharmacy and they're almost dead, that's when you go to the hospital. So we know that part isn’t captured. So we have a plan in terms of working with pharmacies, to capture that data, because that's critical to be able to analyse data for that sector.

Host: Even to provide proper care as well.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: But for the public sector, we've started working with one state in Nigeria so far. You know Nigeria runs a concurrent legislative kept system with the states, where the states get a sense of autonomy and control over how they administer health care. So we get to work independently with each state. And we started working with Akwa Idom so far. We're able to work with the government there and the ministry of health in drafting out a year on your strategy. And we've been able to roll out to several facilities. The Ministry of Health now has a dashboard in their ministry where they can see the live incidences and diagnosis and they get alerts on different issues that happen across the states in Nigeria.

Host: And it works?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: And it works. You know that’s the amazing part. When it works, even they are surprised. And because of that, we are also getting entry even into more states now. But I can tell you that we cannot ignore the public sector, or we even cannot ignore the government. You know, there's this typical bias from tech companies and startups and no one wants to deal with the government.

Host: You can go at it by yourself because you don't want to deal with the government bureaucracy and all of that.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly but because of the role of the government in public health as a whole, you must work with them. And we like a lot of the people we're seeing in the administration as well. So we're working towards being able to collaborate with them in giving them the tools they require because they're one of the key stakeholders in healthcare to be able to improve overall public health in an immeasurable manner.

Host: So I have an Uber dilemma for you. Okay. So Uber has built a business where drivers and riders are connected on the platform, right? And if you think about it, Uber could have chosen to do a solution that's focused primarily on taxi drivers, for example. And the taxi market is not exactly like the healthcare market, but they kind of face similar challenges: supply and monopoly, minimal efficiency, and substandard customer experience. Right. So the question is, why did you decide on a medical records app for the healthcare system, rather than a marketplace where doctors and patients could connect, for example? 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: That is an excellent question. So I think the difference in our thinking and approach in healthcare versus how we're thinking about transportation and logistics, is that we think of the parties and healthcare as actually three tiers, which makes it a more complicated marketplace than two tiers. And an example of a clear picture of that is we break them into three categories. We call them, the three P's, providers, payers, and patients, if it were just providers and patients, and there weren't any other type of Payers or other people involved in the healthcare sector, I think we'd have a much different healthcare model. But providers being in the hospital facilities, payers now come to lots of different entities, this could be HMOs, insurance companies, this could be corporations themselves, this could be different kinds of aid agencies. Because of that complicated structure and because whoever is the payer, whoever holds the bag gets to control things that happen. We actually had to take a different approach than a marketplace approach. 

So we decided to go into providers first, and our solution so far is completely centred around providers and making their process of administering health care from medical records. So their operations and finances are much faster and much more efficient, much more accountable, all these things. But so we understand that in the process of doing that, we've been able to solve problems for payers and patients to be able to build solutions because, within the provider network itself, they have their forms of payments. For example, hospitals have to deal with claim submissions, they have to generate schemes, and they have to manage all these things. They have to also send information to the patients to communicate, they have to make the records digital, and you have to have a patient app that people can access their records. And so in focusing on the provider solution, we're able to say let's make the lives of providers easy. And by doing so we gain access to the payers and the patients.

Host: So do you see in the future, your platform being like a digital health care centre for example? 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. That is the inevitable goal that we're heading towards, having a connected ecosystem where all these three parties get to interact in an Uber-style method, that's also transparent, accountable, and not driven by any other factors.

Host: It's interesting that you said we have the three-tier system, but in Nigeria, don't we have more like two tiers? Most people kind of pay out of pocket anyway.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: That's very true. In fact, in analysing some healthcare data across our systems, one of the things we noticed is that even people who have health insurance, still end up paying a lot of money out of pocket, every time they go to the hospital with their insurance. And you know, initially, when we're doing this analysis, we assume that people have insurance, just exclude them, then just do the numbers from those that do not have insurance. But then we realised everything wasn't added up again. And when we investigated, we realised people were paying for it. One thing I did was I reached out to some of the MDs to the top insurance companies in Nigeria, health insurance. And I said, Well, you know, it's like people have insurance and all these people are still paying so what are we doing? One of the things they explained is that insurance in Nigeria is limited to primary care because they don't have enough data to design plans around secondary care. So they don't have enough information or data points to say, solutions. Exactly right, so they don't go that far. It's malaria and typhoid.

Host: That’s what we have. When we have cancer, we go to India.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Insurance is expensive to construct, and in order to do it properly, for it to become profitable for them, it is a business after all. Since I have data points to be able to build those models. Yeah, we don't have them, we can’t offer them, and we are not going to shoot blind in the process. So that's one of the things we'll be able to do in the future, leveraging the data that we have, to design better plans for insurance providers.

Host: Funny, you just talked about data. Obviously, there's been a lot of conversation around data privacy, yes. Especially in the digital space, people are demanding more privacy with healthcare data, with all these big tech companies going into healthcare now. There are now tighter regulations around how you can use patient data. And the patient is still someone who's mobile and is probably prone to switching hospitals, depending on whatever his needs are. So how are you ensuring security and privacy but also just enabling interoperability of the information on your systems?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: This is a very excellent question.

Host: I feel like you’ve said an excellent question three times.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: You know, you’re talking about all the points that we care so much about, but people don't talk to us about. Because when you go to the hospital, the providers are thinking about making money, that’s what’s on their minds. They are not thinking about privacy and interoperability, they don't even care what's happening in the next hospital. One of the biggest issues we have as a sector and one of the reasons was because there are some sectors where even without technology, because of how they're structured, you get to do things and run efficiently. But fragmentation is a big problem in healthcare. There can be 10 hospitals on the same road, they don't know each other, they don't interact, and you don't know what happens there. Even the government doesn't understand what happens there. They just are divided. And when we think about that, interoperability just begins to come back to our minds. So I'm going to speak first to the data security aspect, okay, we have helium health, and we uphold global healthcare medical standards because there are not enough local ones to even hold in the first place. So we do our best and meet you at standards which are HIPAA compliant, using ICD 10 codes and proper coding structures. That way the system itself is meeting global standards. So when Nigeria and a different African country that we currently operate in begin to catch up, we will be way ahead of the curve. I don't know if you know how crazy and insane US healthcare laws are. But that is what the trend in the US is. What deters people from going into healthcare for tech are so many regulations.

Everyone is just like I’m not bothered, it’s not worth it. Everyone is like nothing is happening. There are too many rules. Yeah, so long as we meet global standards, when we as a nation begin to catch up, for example, the Nigerian data regulation agency published a new set of laws earlier this year, that's similar to GDPR. It just seemed like a copy of GDPR. And by the time they published that, firstly, I said, as soon as I saw the email, I sent it across my team to make sure that everyone was on board and everyone's reply as we read through was we already do everything there. Everything from disclosures to making people consent, to having consent records, to audit trails, we already did all these things. So we're like, perfect, which is exactly what we designed. Yeah. So from a security standpoint, that's good. Because we meet these global standards. The second part of the question was about interoperability. So lots of that still has to do with managing the mindsets of the people we're dealing with. Let me give you some context here. The platform itself is designed in a FHIR, FHIR is a protocol that people are now using globally for interoperability. Because this issue of interoperability even happens in places like the US and Canada there. 

There's a crazy healthcare problem going on where data is interoperable because private companies buy different systems. And then also the biggest holders of medical record software, and no one wants to share anything about the technology because it's a private competition. Because if it were public, it could be influenced by the data response market. This one is just private owners, no one wants to disclose. So the government has to force people into interoperable systems, which means they have to build a standard and say, when you're building your medical records on encounters, this is the standard you have to meet one of the newest standards that people are now starting to adopt globally for medical record systems, equipment and medical machinery, MRI systems, all these things as a standard called FHIR. So what we've done is adopt FHIR in our system. And as the whole world begins to adopt it, it becomes faster to move data around. So that's the technical side, now I have to speak about the cultural mindset aspect, this is the interesting part, right? 

As a patient, your medical records, it's yours really, when you think about it, that doesn't belong to the hospital. The way Nigeria is designed right now because you have physical files at the hospital's location, they belong to the hospital, and that mindset is still there. And the hospital owners and the doctors feel like they can say, this is our data, but really, you can't have access to it. But you start thinking about it from a competition standpoint, these are private hospitals, where they started their hospital without anybody’s money and they are still struggling now. So they feel like, if they gave it to you, they gave you the ability to go anywhere, they probably lose you as a patient. But in reality, data has been shown from real data studies globally, that's not true. Because, you know, there are several other factors, but that would keep me as a patient. And one of those is even trusting you, knowing that you have their best interests at heart. And the very fact that a lot of these places or hospitals in Nigeria, don't want you to take your record anywhere else. It's them saying that they don’t have your best interest.

Host: It almost sounds shady, it's almost like don’t take it to another hospital because I don't want anybody else to see what I have been doing. 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: But you could find better care for different reasons. somewhere else, and it’s not right. And there are many other issues too. And that's one of the reasons why we don't accept every platform that reaches out to us to adopt EMR at every facility just yet. Because we have to do our assessments. There are cases where people are not doing the right things in their hospital, and they don't want anyone to know. Now, imagine if somebody mis-administers drugs. And it happens all the time people die every day in this country from this. And by the time we try to research, legally, they say the file is missing. 

Host: And now with EMR, there can be no such excuses.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly, so they're thinking about all these things. And they're, you know, it's still a way, there's still that mentality of I don't want the patient to go anywhere. However, because we're technology-driven, we are already starting to push that ourselves and make it accessible to our clients. We're talking to the hospitals about what they can grant access to. Okay, some of them are saying we don't want our full, for example, surgical notes, all these things reviewed. However prescriptions, vitals, exactly these things should be revealed. So we're starting somewhere. But in the future, inevitably, everything should be open. Because again, it's an accountability system. It's even a way for you to say, We're such a good hospital that we don't care where you go with this.

Host: You can take these records anywhere, and it will be okay. 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly, but also in the future, we know that there'll be the government and there'll be a legislative push to do things properly because you just can’t leave people to do things because it's the right thing, they will do what's best for them.

Host: Exactly. But even in terms of other EMR companies in this market, is there a coalition that is your way of working together to ensure interoperability, or is everyone just kind of doing their own thing?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: I wasn’t the kind of person to push for collaboration, and also I’m going to be culturally again, collaboration is not something that businesses like to do, and it’s something that I've had to fight against. And there are some ways I’ve fought against it, for example, Helium Health has acquired two other EMR providers, you know, full acquisition to their technology, their client base, their team, everything over the last two years. We have three other acquisitions across Africa that we're doing diligence on, you know, because if you're like, that's kind of the mindset we have, bringing people together. I’ve met a lot of these people and I'm like, you've built good systems, you’ve built sector technology. But I can see all these holes in your system. Yeah, I can. And I understand you know, you didn't you probably didn't raise venture capital, you probably you're running to the private business, certain things you have to do. But there's a higher standard we need to hold to deliver. Yeah, so we at Helium House, we've done acquisitions, and we do our best to partner with people. And we're pushing for everyone to meet the same standards because it makes it easier to collaborate. Because how do I work if we're meeting FHIR standards, we’re meeting HIPAA compliance? 

Host: And then someone just wants to do the bare minimum. 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly right? Because he just wants money, it doesn’t even matter. So that's one factor. So there's a factor where we're collaborating with people. We are making acquisitions and mergers, we are collaborating with people and making sure they meet standards. And then there's the other part where we do fight people who are not doing things the right way and do our best to kick them out of the market because that work also impacts everyone else.

Host: One bad egg can just ruin the entire industry. 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: That was one of the reasons it was so hard to get this off the ground in the first place because there’s a handful of places you'd go to in the country that has attempted it. And they are like not today, we are not falling for this again.

Host: Okay, so we kind of touched on this earlier when we're talking about pharmacies. The idea of EMR is that you can capture longitudinal data of patients, right? But then, if the hospital is not the first point of care, how do you ensure that you're capturing these gaps in terms of disease progression for the patient if the patient doesn't go to hospitals? So how are you ensuring the accuracy of your data and filling in the gaps between the first sign of symptoms?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: I'm not going to say an excellent question. But you know what I want to say. Because that is also another point that people don't talk to us about on a normal day, because they're thinking about it from their side, if you're a provider, you think about it from provider payers, patient care about that. But this is important overall, this is where I circle all three together.

Host: Just like providing good healthcare. Yeah. So how are you doing that?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: So the way we think about it is, beyond going beyond hospitals and collaborating with pharmacies and putting our technology there. We think about it as a difference between saying we're an EMR system, just an EMR system to saying, we are also an EHR system. So it's not just your electronic medical records. And your health records cover not just your records from an encounter, which is what your medical record is, but your health records across your lifespan from when you were born to the end, which is what you're saying now. So that's actually how our systems and our data structure are designed, wanting to capture care across the ecosystem. So that says, first of all, it means we need to extend beyond facilities where Helium Health is. So saying, if you don't use our software and use other software, how do we still get that data? How do we build an interoperable system that meets a certain standard where that data could fit because that patient matters the most, right? So even if it's a different system, they can still access this data for the sake of administering care to the patient. 

So that's one factor we have to consider. Then we have to think through all the other places where the patient could access care, and what creative ways we can integrate into these places to gather data, because again, what we're trying to do is gather data at the point of care, not summarise data at different points, but data at the point of care. This means, for example, let's say you went to a pharmacy, and there was a cash register or a POS system at the checkouts. You are the patient walking in, and you ask for advice from the pharmacist. This happens, this is a full encounter, this is a consultation. I myself was at the pharmacy like 12 hours ago and the pharmacist did a full consultation, and there was no record of it. However, when you’re about to check out they pick all the drugs, it was four and I checked out on pay. 

So we then are thinking why don't we partner with that POS machine, that system that knows this is the person who paid and these are all the drugs he paid for and you can state their medical, you might as well extend their system to say that this is the reason stated, or if it’s not stated, you can say that this is what they didn't state or this is the reasons stated for it. And it feeds into it. And we have other sources connected and can use different identifiers to piece that patient's record together. So that's what the ideal solution is. That's one thing we're working on through 2020. How do we integrate with the systems to automate that flow, so the patient doesn't even have to care about it, we can just talk to that player and say, you know, the person, that technology provider, and say, let's work together on this to improve overall patient care.

Host: Okay, so now we're going to switch a bit to the fun part. You know, there are a lot of people that make predictions. So I predict this will happen next year or the next five years. What was the last prediction you got wrong?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: What was the last prediction I got wrong? I would say it was the success of the Android operating system. That was probably the last prediction I got wrong. 

Host: What did you predict? 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: I predicted that it was going to disappear completely like the market share was going to be zero. If you use the initial Android phone and operating system, it was very clunky. There was this “App has been forced to stop” something that it was very famous for. So I thought it was a joke that there was no way it would recover from this. Why would engineers compare this to Apple, ever wanting to build for this? But I then started to realise that open source is a sense of community that was the fun part. That alone is enough of a factor for there to always be two different providers. Yeah, so that was enough to write it. So that was a good one. Okay, but I’m still an iPhone lover. Always apple.

Host: Hashtag. What's one view you seem to find very few people agree on?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: In this part of the world, I would say it's the point I made earlier about collaboration. We, coming together and having a small piece of a bigger pie is a lot better than having a giant piece of a mighty minuscule pie. 

Host: Yes. 

And that is something I fight for every day for people to see. Because there's a crazy amount of collaboration that has to happen around the world for real progress to be made. And even across Healthcare, there's a trend of consolidation, both vertically and horizontally across the system.

Host: Even in the Pharma industry, it's like everywhere.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: It's the same thing. Yeah. Like, that's something I have to drive the mentality on. And because I know we're going to be expanding across Africa, I know it's going to be a continuous conversation, because not just the Nigerian or Ghanian, it's the same factor across the continent.

Host: Okay. So we like to think of disruption as being interrelated. So our previous interviewee has a question for you. Okay. So his name is Uwa Agbonile, the CEO of Infoware. So his question for you is

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: I know him.

Host: You know him? Great. So his question for you is, how do you learn? And how do you adapt quickly enough, but still carry people along?

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: How do you learn and adapt and still carry people along? Okay, let me think about this from an organisation-wide perspective. Because those are people that I work with that I have to carry along. Yes, I, myself, I'm evolving through different conversations. I think there's the aspect of it, where you build a good communication framework. And one of the challenges that we have to identify at a point in Helium Health was communication as a problem. When you're dealing with decentralised teams, you have a team in the North, you have a team in the West. You have a team in other countries, and you have everyone working on different things. But in the process, they're all learning different things. Yeah, they all have different ideas, just like different mindsets, but you need it to be singular on the same page to feed into each other, for it to get the best out of it in the process. One thing we need to identify is that that gap was there. And if you don't actively build a framework around it, the people with different kinds of information will become isolated. So you could be the CEO, you can be the manager of a unit, or you or your people may think a certain way about a isolated from what the rest of the organisation is thinking.

Host: And that happens a lot.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: So you need to take active steps towards building a framework around it through different things. You could have collaborative strategy sessions, all hands virtual meetings. One thing I love best about how we work is that we have built virtual work into what we do. Because we've broken the mindset, I believe in remote work very much, I don't believe you have to ever be in the same room to do anything. We've broken that mindset very much. We have all-hands meetings, operationally. We have all-hands meetings for product teams. And these people are in different countries. 

Some of them are in Europe, some are travelling across Europe, and they are doing all this work across the continent. And it's like, we're able to feel like we're all together almost every day. And we have these meetings, you know, for different teams and different people involved almost every time because you need to build a communication framework, otherwise, each person will be in their world doing their own thing, and it’s not going to fit together.

Host: Okay, so final question. Now you've answered Uwa’s question. What's one perspective you'd like to get from our next interviewee? 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Perspective from the next interviewee. 

Host: Or any questions that you have, It could be anything.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Okay, let me think. What about Nigeria, would you like to change specifically? One thing about Nigeria that you’d like to change that you think would transform the industry you work in? 

Host: That's a really good question. 

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: That's my question.

Host: Okay. Thank you so much Goke for coming in today to spend some time with us on the experience pod, we hope that you've had a great time. I've enjoyed this conversation, and I hope that you have too, thank you.

Mr. Adegoke Olubusi: Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here and I had an excellent conversation.