By Sola Ogundipe

Several years before he became the Founder/CEO of Axxess, the leading global home healthcare technology company based in Dallas, Texas, with locations around the world, including Lagos, Nigeria, Niyi John Olajide, had a strong passion for computing.

Telecommunications engineer from the University of Texas, Dallas, Olajide, who was recognised as the Outstanding Healthcare Executive of the Year, and a Leader in Diversity, is passionate about improving the quality of healthcare services delivered to patients in their homes by empowering healthcare organisations with state-of-the-art software solutions.

As a 20-year-old undergraduate in the US, he endeared himself onto the path of success when he became a consultant to various home healthcare agencies, creating technology solutions for delivering their services.

“I am very passionate about economic development and Nigeria is blessed with excellent human resources,” he told Saturday Vanguard in a chat.

Narrating how he is contributing towards making society a better place, he recalled a visit to his aunt who worked for a local healthcare organisation several years ago while he was in college in the US.

 “I was a very broke college student, so I went to visit my aunt who was going to give me money, I think $100, $200, or something like that.

“It was a fairly large size organisation and I noticed that a lot of people there were working at different workstations at different desks. This was in 2001.”

 He noticed that the computers there were running obsolete technology and were not networked and started asking questions. His aunt admitted they were not networked.

Olajide explained to her what a computer network was and its benefits, including how it could provide to help improve their business growth, improve their revenues streamline their operations, decrease their cost of doing business and help them be more successful as a business.

“As a healthcare business, I explained that such a computer network would help improve patient outcomes, and she liked the idea so much that she took me to her boss.

 “I explained the same things to her boss who thought it was an amazing idea and asked if I’d build a network for the company. I said I’d do it, and I set out to build a computer network for that organisation. I became the computer guy for the business.”

Olajide did a decent job and soon started similar work for others, and that was how he paid his way through school. The business was healthcare at home where they sent medical professionals to deliver healthcare services to people in their homes.

“I saw earlier on that here was an organisation that was underserved from a technological perspective and more importantly, here is an entire industry, that’s underserved. I saw that they needed technology to help them to be more efficient, so I started doing similar work for lots of different people.”

At some point, Olajide suggested to his aunt to think of setting up her own organisation. Even though she had no idea where to start doing that, he promised to help her figure it out.

“I knew the technology aspect of the business. My parents had their own business, as distributors for Unilever, and so from earlier on as a kid, I already understood business.

“I understood business fundamentally already, and even though I studied engineering, my passion was in business,” said Olajide who at that time, already had a deep understanding beyond what a typical engineer would have.

According to him, the foundation for his entrepreneurial success and business success began in Lagos.

“Very quickly I could see end-to-end what the organisation did, So when I told my aunt that she could build hers, it was just because of an understanding of business there.

“I researched what the license and regulatory standards for that type of business in the US were, particularly in the state of Texas. That was how as a 20-year-old in college, I became the consultant for her business, got her the license, and she got everything that she needed and she was off to a good start. The business still exists and thriving.”

He did similar work for lots of different people simply by recognising an industry that’s underserved from a technological perspective and seeing the ability to create appropriate technology.

Olajide understood, even as a youngster, that the healthcare industry could benefit from cloud-based technology, which is software in the cloud, to help it be more efficient.

“What the healthcare organisation did was to send medical professionals to people’s homes to provide care and then after documenting that care, the organisation collects that information and after billing the insurance companies, or whoever they need to bill, and manage all that.

“There were times the organisation would need to wait two weeks to get documentation on what was happening to that patient. That’s not effective because the patient could have been dead after two weeks.

“So I asked why we can’t create technology where we can present excellent health care and then get this information in the real-time. The way that I was thinking about that was revolutionary at that time. No one thought about things in that manner.

“I thought they could document all that and then the back office can get that information, process it, bill the insurance companies, and do whatever needs to be done, provide reports so that they can grow their business, decrease, their cost of doing business, and  streamline their operations.”

So he and his team set out to build the technology and although he thought it would take just six months, the first version of the software actually took four years to get it done.

“It was that difficult to build it,” Olajide remarked. “By then I was consulting for different organisations and all the things that I got from that consulting work, I was pouring it into the business to build the technology platform and after four years of work, you would think it’ll be an amazing technology platform.

“It didn’t work the first time. My very first experience wasn’t a success. We worked at it all day, but it did not work. We were very embarrassed, we left the place and went back to the office and worked on it all night to get it to work, and eventually, we got it working.”

The team just kept working at it and today are the leading provider of technology for caring, and the number one, all over the world. There are more than 8,000 organisations with millions of patients benefiting from the cloud-based software to power the delivery of health care services, end-to-end.

On why cloud-based technology is important to Nigeria and especially the developing world, Olajide observed that it is the ideal way to deliver health care.

“Health care home holds a lot of promise for increasing access to quality health care services from more people because there aren’t enough resources even in America anywhere else and particularly in the developing world, to build shiny new hospitals and things like that for healthcare delivery.

“And even if there were, that’s not the right way to deliver health care. I believe, you can always use technology to eliminate distance and get people to healthcare,” he asserted.