Dr. Joseph Olowe, a renowned healthcare specialist and entrepreneur, is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DoktorConnect, an innovative digital platform transforming healthcare in Africa. With over 30 years of experience in physical medicine, garnered mainly from professional practice in the United States of America, Dr. Olowe applies a wealth of knowledge to his entrepreneurial work.
In this interview with Doing Business in Nigeria, Dr. Olowe shares the mission of DoktorConnect, now serving 400,000 users and counting, to move the healthcare system from reactive to proactive care and make quality health services more accessible and affordable for Africans. Excerpts:
Question: How did you decide to start DoktorConnect in Nigeria?
Answer: An incident happened. That incident led me to take the bold decision to come and do something in Nigeria. A friend of mine by the name of Jim passed away at age 42. Jim was a wonderful, healthy young man who worked out, ate well, ate right. He was somebody who paid attention to his health. Unfortunately, he passed away at age 42 and the cause of death was something that could have been prevented.
Jim had an autoimmune disease, a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks healthy cells. This affected his pancreas and led to Type 1 diabetes, which means his pancreas could not produce enough insulin. But Jim did not know because there was no sign of that, until one day when he stepped on a nail in his office. The nail caused a puncture wound, and the wound would not heal. As one thing led to another, there was an infection, which led to bone sepsis, which led to the amputation of Jim’s leg.
Once his leg was amputated, Jim went into severe depression because he could not imagine how, in a couple of months, six months, a year, everything turned around for him, a once healthy guy. Jim committed suicide, leaving a wife, two children and a thriving information technology business. Jim did not have a fighting chance when it came to his health.
I was in the United States at that time and for many more years. I just felt there’s got to be a change. I felt we had to do something in Nigeria because our healthcare is on sick care. By that, I mean you must be sick to be treated, not for you to seek care before you are sick. Who says you cannot get care when you are not sick?
Right now, Nigerians wait until they become sick before they access healthcare. That is not health care. That is sick care. When you buy a new car, and you are driving that car, that car does everything for you. Every three months, you take it to the mechanic for an oil change. Why do you do that? You service the car without waiting for the day it fails to start. If you do that to a car, why not human beings? That’s what DoktorConnect does. We are the service center for you. Come in. Once a year, let’s do the service. Let’s put you on the path to health and wellness. That’s why we are moving from sick care to health care.
In response, we designed a solution to help solve that problem. We launched it in the United States but realised that Nigeria needed it most. As one thing led to the other, we moved everything to Nigeria. We’ve been in Nigeria since 2021 and are going strong.
Question: What strategies did you use to enter the Nigerian market?
Answer: If I told you that we came into Nigeria with a plan and everything worked, I would be lying. We came in with the belief that a lot of people would love to know what can kill them, what would be a problem in their body. Unfortunately, we realized that many people don’t care. Some people even told us that they don’t even want to know what would kill them. So, our idea of telling people to seek healthcare when they are not sick did not fly at all.
We had to change our strategy, and one of the strategies we looked at was, well, employers are already asking people to do pre-employment tests and screening before they hire them. We had to pivot into that. We started approaching companies and showing them our solutions, and our tests.
Employers could see that they can track the health of their employees, beginning from when they come in as employees. Then, on an annual basis, the employee can know what is going on in his or her body. They can follow the advice that we give them. Eventually, the companies we’re working with started seeing a lot of improvement in their workforce.
Some of our tests are tests that many people will typically have to go and do abroad. From one customer to another customer to another customer, we are beginning to change the hearts of people. That has been our story since we started.
Question: You said your initial marketing strategy didn’t work as planned. What was the strategy, and how did you pivot into what you are doing now?
Answer: The strategy was to take the individual approach, which, if we were coming in as a hospital, maybe it would have worked. But when you want people to access health care when they are not sick, it’s a strange thing to Nigerians. We thank God that is changing fast. I had a meeting in my office today, and the way people want to start consuming health care right now to make sure that they stay healthy is even scary. The way we are going, with the trend we are seeing right now, we might even begin to surpass the United States and countries in Europe. People are now shifting. The best bet is to stay away from sickness before it becomes a major concern that we must spend a lot of money on. Which is why we focus on healthcare instead of sick care. Currently, our highest preventive health care plan costs N152,000 per year, which is less than the cost of one or two hospital nights.
Question: The core offer of DoktorConnect for achieving health care as opposed to sick care is the annual tests, right?
Answer: Right! A robust annual test covers the systems. Because we have systems in our body, we want to make sure that every system is functioning very well. That’s why we can tie everything together. When you buy our plan for N152,000, you don’t have to worry about paying to see a doctor for the entire year, and that can be done online. But if you want to see us in the office, you can come for a fee. Otherwise, your primary care doctor’s visits are automatically covered. If you need a cardiologist or a nephrologist, or a neurologist, we can tell you what you need to do.
Question: If someone walks into your facility for your annual health check, what tests will the person do?
Answer: We administer over 80 tests in blood work, which includes a physical examination. For example, we are the only ones who do double-hand blood pressure. When you come to our facility, we take your blood pressure simultaneously on both hands, and we look for a blood pressure differential just to make sure that the differential in pressure is less than 10 millimeters of mercury. If it’s more than 10 millimeters of mercury, you can have an underlying cardiovascular problem just by doing that one test. People have strokes on the right side or the left side. Why do others only take blood pressure on one side? We are the only ones that do both sides for now.
There are other tests that we do that others don’t do. We are the only ones who can predict how your body is aging. We have a test that can tell us your cell age. You say you are 50 years old, but you could be 55 at the cellular level. I have seen a lady who was 43 years of age while her cellular level age was 48, meaning she was five years older than her body. That could happen because of oxidation, stress, malnutrition or other causes. That means the cell is aging faster than the body. When I hear that someone died young, I always say that the person died young by chronological age, but, at the cellular level, maybe the person is a Methuselah. We can reverse such cases with supplements, so that the cell age can at least match the physical age.
Question: Nigerians don’t trust the healthcare system, especially when they use it online. How is DoktorConnect building trust to bridge the divide for people who previously received medical attention in physical hospitals now having to access preventive services virtually, often on their mobile device?
Answer: We have always believed in a hybrid solution. We quickly understood that the best solution would be a hybrid solution whereby we bring you into our facility or come to you, have a conversation with you, and show you our tests. We take you through our protocol. Like the company that came to our office today. The owners, a husband and wife, brought their head marketer. We gave them a tour of our facility and offered our tests to them, free of charge. We told them: If you don’t like it, don’t pay. After they left, they promised that we would be seeing 1,000 members of their company.
That is the power of giving them something to say, hey, this is the beginning. You come, we see you, we do your test, then we don’t need to see you again for 365 days. And you come back for a follow-up. Every other thing can be done online. Your medication can be done online. Your doctor Sessions can be done online. Your courses can be done online. Your therapy can be done online. You can even do your blood pressure and blood sugar and send the data to us online.
We make them see how we work and take them on a customer journey that makes them to become our evangelists. Today, those three people who came to our office, I believe that they have become our evangelists. Apart from giving us 1,000 people, they are telling us how we can work with the other members in other states in Nigeria. We told them we have it under control because we already have the network to take care of people outside Lagos.
Question: Your company is headquartered in El Paso, Texas, in the United States. What were the challenges you faced, as someone not domiciled in Nigeria but setting up a business and managing its operations in the country?
Answer: The bottom line is that every business, no matter how good or how steady or how strong, needs people. To be honest with you, people are the key infrastructure for getting everything done. I cannot be here the entire year. I’ll come and leave. Believe it or not, people are complaining about people who are working for them, complaining that the people are not dependable. The truth is that there are still valuable people in Nigeria, people who want to see Nigeria better, people who want to see you successful.
God has gifted us with such staff. We now have 35 staff, and we take good care of them. They have taken ownership of the company. We have a stock option and a vesting period. A hard-working employee who has stayed with us for a certain number of years can become a co-owner, even if it’s just one share or two shares, and he or she owns a part of the business. This helps us with retention because people look forward to the fact that they are not just working, that they are becoming owners, part-owners of the business. DoktorConnect is the employee’s business. If he or she wants to destroy it, then we will quickly identify and eliminate that person. To be honest, we have only had to let one person go in the four years that we have been in business. That’s our blessing, that’s how fortunate we are with the people who are running our operation. So, in Nigeria, there are still good people who can hold your hand while you are not here.
Question: How are you able to attract such dependable employees and retain them over the years?
Answer: When we started the company, we came in with so much enthusiasm. We showed them the technology. They first have to believe in technology, then we realised, to my utmost surprise, that it is not money that people are looking after. They just want to see if there’s stability, if they can build their future in the company.
The first thing we told them was, yes, if you give us your 100% effort, we will give you 100% reward. In line with that, we have taken everybody who works in our business as part of our family, our global family. With every opportunity we send our employees abroad to train, we send them. We have sent people to the United States, to France, to Saudi Arabia, to Germany. As the opportunity comes, we make it available for our people, and they see that we have an interest in their growth. Currently, we have another opportunity coming from Morocco. I am grooming the people who will go. DoktorConnect is the business that is taking us there because we have an opportunity to expand our operation into the countries that I just mentioned.
Question: In starting the business, did you do analysis or research into the terrain or experience challenges that you didn’t expect?
Answer: I will answer the question in two ways. Number one, I went to school in Nigeria. I studied Physiotherapy at the University of Lagos Teaching Hospital. I am in Nigeria, a born Nigerian, a thorough Nigerian. Nothing surprised me. I made up my mind when I came that nothing would be a surprise. I have a mantra, a saying: As I am coming out of the airport in Lagos, everything in America stays at the airport. I know that there will be heat in Nigeria. There are times like yesterday, when I went to my house in Ibadan. The generator engine just knocked. Well, I slept in the dark.
Yes! You must be willing to go through the discomfort and live with it. If you have this mentality that everything should work the way you want it to work, you are not ready for business in Nigeria. You are not ready to do anything in Nigeria. That’s number one.
Number two. What shocked the daylight out of me when we came into Nigeria was the power supply. We had a generator. We had everything and things were going well, until 2023. Suddenly, things got worse when we started paying almost N2,000,000 every month to run our generator. That was not in our playbook, and it almost destabilised us. But we quickly adjusted. We tried not to raise our price but eventually did. We adjusted our plan and rolled with the punches. We told ourselves that whatever does not kill you will always make you stronger. We managed to bring that under control. We now know that we must be prepared for the unforeseen.
Question: How did DoktorConnect decide on the market to target its services?
Question: If you were to start DoktorConnect again, is there anything you would do differently?
Answer: Yes. What I will do differently is what we discovered. I would have thought about partnering with Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) to try and let them see the upside of keeping their members well. Because one of the problems we faced was that, when we talked to people, they asked: Why should I buy your plan now that I have HMO? My HMO does some of the things that you do, but not all. But I know that yours is bigger. But why can’t you go talk to my HMO and have this in my HMO? That was when we started approaching HMOs. We have been able to partner with some HMOs who are very happy with the benefits we are providing.
Question: Your virtual services require internet access. How do you plan to reach segments of the population, like the rural areas, that have limited access to the internet?
Answer: If we are talking about Nigeria, one of the things that floated our boat is that we were able to get data from the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC). Available data shows that not fewer than 150 million Nigerians actively use internet-enabled devices. Out of 220 million people, about 150 million people are using data to watch YouTube and Netflix, doing online shopping, and buying things on Amazon, Jumia, Konga, etc. It is easy for us to build on top of that. I will give you an example. The security man who looks after my house has two phones. He watches YouTube and sends me messages on WhatsApp. You will be surprised that some of the rural people we are talking about have better phones than some of us who live in Lagos.
A case in point. I was talking to a young lady who was doing housekeeping. She decided to leave the job to do something for herself. During her stay with the family, she was able to raise N500,000 over eight months. When she was leaving, they gave her that money. She said she wanted to start a tailoring apprenticeship, and everybody wanted to support her. You know the first thing she did after she got the money? She bought a phone for N120,000 out of that money. Believe me, internet access or availability of digital devices is not a problem in Nigeria. The question is how we can find ourselves in those devices.
Question: How do you envision DoktorConnect in the next 10 years? Where do you see the business in the next decade?
Answer: Before I answer that question, let me quickly tell you what we do at DoktorConnect that sets us apart from other diagnostic outlets. We don’t consider ourselves a diagnostic outlet. We are a preventive tool that people can use. When that incident happened to my friend, Jim, we asked, what can we do to give people the best picture of their health? We thought about places like the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in the United States. We looked at Harvard Medical. We realised that these places offer expensive high-technology tests that people get at costs ranging from about $15,000 to $30,000. We told ourselves that, if we could replicate those tests and offer them at much lower costs, we would have done something for Nigerians. Our baseline test is a 23-25-page report that gives you a breakdown of your health. That’s the first thing we do at DoktorConnect. Guess what? We are using technology to offer those tests to Nigerians at about $100!
We allow you to do over 80 tests that can give you an insight into your health. We have one more thing that we do on the testing side. If you have the money, which is not expensive, we can do a once-in-a-lifetime DNA test that allows us to see what might happen to your health in the next 25 years. Our DNA analysis, which is called the Longevity Score, can assign a score based on certain factors and tell, from your genes, the probability of a disease killing you. On the treatment side, after the DNA test, you can come on our platform and talk to a doctor, a mental health therapist, a nutritionist or dietitian, without leaving the comfort of your home. This way, we do tests and treatment, and can track progress.
How are we able to track progress? We track progress in three ways. Number one, people have wearable devices like Apple, Samsung and Garmin watches. You can connect such devices to our platform and transmit data to us. We also have our own devices. We have a weighing scale that you step on and connect to our hub, and you will be able to see 14 to 18 metrics about your health, which will enable us to tell if you are hydrated or dehydrated. We will be able to know the amount of protein in your body, the amount of minerals in your body, and how many calories you need per day to maintain your weight. We can tell your Body Mass Index (BMI) and the things in your body, just by taking your weight.
We also have a device called a 6-in-1. We can check your blood pressure and take your blood sugar. We can also do a quick two-lead Electrocardiogram (ECG). All this you can do in the comfort of your home and send us the results online before the doctor sees you sitting in front of him. Another thing we do is to scan your face and get your blood pressure, your blood sugar, and your diabetes risk. When you upload that data, we can download and analyze it in real time.
We can also give you tools that can help you maintain your health daily. We have over seven tools that can help to track your medication, determine if you need blood work, and advise what to do. Our platform has an online gym, so you can do your exercise online.
We have about 400,000 Nigerians currently on our platform. We have just been invited by two groups in Saudi Arabia. They looked at our solution because 70% of people in Saudi Arabia have diabetes. They want us to launch out there. We are talking to partners in South Africa. We just shipped our equipment to Egypt. We are at 75 medical offices in the United States as I speak. We are growing into a global company, and the future is bright for us because the world is looking more into the prevention of diseases, which is the future of medicine.
Question: Have you observed other opportunities that DoktorConnect can take advantage of?
Answer: We came up with an opportunity for people to prevent their health from failing. Now, we are working with a group of people to launch health insurance. We are building a health care platform called Kampe Health, which is part of working with DoktorConnect. Kampe Health Care is an insurance product that provides any insurance that you might need. We are building several pillars into this product.
The first pillar is health insurance, which means you typically have the insurance that you need to use with the Doctor. You can see a doctor, you can be admitted to the hospital, you can use it for your medication and all that. The second pillar is a robust wellness plan. The third pillar is the Disability Plan, which covers someone who does not fall sick but suddenly becomes disabled. We also have the Hospital Cash cover for people admitted into a hospital for whatever reason. A pillar of the plan covers critical illness, like cancer or a heart attack, by providing a certain amount of money that will help a person through the illness or, in case of death, cover some of the burial expenses. The seventh pillar provides a plan whereby people don’t have to pay for insurance and only need to work with the DoktorConnect e-commerce platform through a reward system instead of paying the premium.
The Kampe Plan has two options, Kampe Basic and Kampe Plus. The Basic attracts a premium of N26,600 per year, while the Plus costs N36,500 per year. We believe that Kampe Health Insurance will change the face of health care in Nigeria.
We are hoping that Nigerians in the diaspora will buy Kampe Health Insurance for their families in Nigeria. They can also buy it for themselves, for use when in Nigeria. It will give them access to hospitals like Coptic, Reddington, Dutchess and Evercare. With our solution, the best for our healthcare system is yet to come. For diaspora Nigerians who want to come home, this is the best time to come to Nigeria because Nigeria is not waiting for anybody. Nigeria is moving fast.
Question: What’s your niche? What space is DoktorConnect trying to occupy in the healthcare system in Nigeria? Who’s your ideal client?
Answer: If you look at our solution, we are catering to corporations, which is great. But at the same time, we build on our platform an opportunity for you to be able to scan your face and be able to get your blood pressure and go online to talk to a doctor. Every Tom, Dick and Harry can do that. Let me give you one example. If you go to myMTN app marketplace, DoktorConnect is there. One of the things we wanted to do is to democratize access to Doctors. You can sit at your home at Seven O’clock and just go to the myMTN App Store and book for DoktorConnect. Those are the things we are doing for everyday people. They can get a one-time consultation for a small fee.
Question: What informed the use of D-O-K-T-O-R, instead of doctor, in the name of your business?
Answer: I’m glad that it caught your attention. That is the purpose of what we did. It makes you stop and wonder, why is it K and not C? We want you to be curious to know what we do. That hook has always worked to make sure that people say, okay, what do you do? Do you connect doctors with patients? Yes, it’s part of it, but we go deeper. We connect you with all the resources in healthcare.
And we know that medical doctors are the ones who drive the healthcare system in our part of the world. That’s why we say once you connect with a doctor, it can help you with your mental health, with your nutrition, with your lab work and everything else. That’s the idea. That’s why we named it like that.
Question: What’s the size of the investment in DoktorConnect, and how did you get started?
Answer: We have invested close to $3 million to build the platform and support facilities, and we are just getting started. We are raising another $2 million from our investors to expand our facilities and grow.
Question: Are these individual or institutional investors?
Answer: We decided to hold a Venture Capital run for our seed round. That’s what we are doing right now. We are talking to three institutional investors, but the gate is still open for individuals who want to invest. Our minimum ticket is $25,000. If anybody wants to invest, we can sit with them and show them what they are investing in.
Question: Is there something you want to talk about that we have not talked about?
Answer: What we love to do is extend our patronage to people who want to come. If your company is looking for the best employee wellness, we will be glad to talk to you and help you take care of your employees. Our solution is available. We also welcome individuals seeking personalised healthcare services. We will be glad to talk to you and make our solution available at a very affordable price to our customers.
Question: How can DoktorConnect be reached by people who want to access its services?
Answer: DoktorConnect can be reached at its website, www.doktorconnect.com, by email, info@doktorconnect.com and on phone at 0704 770 0006. It can also be reached on social media: @DoktorConnect on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.