CHIBUZO OPARA, is the chief executive officer of DrugStoc, a health-tech company that is revolutionising healthcare in Nigeria on the wings of innovation and technology. In this interview with PETER IMOUOKHOME, he spoke on the trajectory of the firm in the healthcare sector and the challenges DrugStoc and similar health start-ups are facing in the Nigerian healthcare space.
The healthcare sector has witnessed some disruptive digital disruptions coming up from the Covid-19 period. Several health innovations have sprung up. Within that period and now, what would you say has been the role of Drugstoc in terms of providing the necessary solution for the healthcare sector?
For us, the Covid-19 pandemic was something that made a lot more people become aware of the new challenges in the sector. I wouldn’t say that Covid-19 is what defined us as a tech company. We have been around long before Covid-19 providing solutions but during the pandemic, a lot of supply chains and pharmacies realised the importance of dealing with a cloud-based supply chain and a provider who understood the situation and the needs of pharmacies and patients. One who could meet them where they are most in need and that really played a lot in our favour as we were able to provide services for our clients and for the greater population.
I would say that for us, Covid-19 just raised something we have always known, which is that the only way to provide healthcare services in Nigeria is to leapfrog the infrastructural challenges. We are not going to build the sector the way everybody in the world has built it. If you follow that trajectory, you would need to invest at least $1 billion a year into the healthcare infrastructure over the next 10 years to be able to come to the infrastructural level of advanced economies.
The fiscal envelope in Nigeria is quite faint when it comes to that and even when you look at advanced countries, for them obviously, the quantum of investment is larger but all over the world, people are beginning to realise that the health-tech and pharma tech solutions are what will enable this next-generation way of expansion and access to care. So that is what Covid-19 did and it fundamentally brought the focus on the healthcare industry and I think you are likely to see more solutions coming up over the next few months to years.
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Last year, Drugstoc raised $4.4 million in Series A funding, following this, what are your plans to expand operations?
For us, the fund that we raised was to be able to go into two key aspects and the first is to expand our logistics infrastructure, and the second is to expand our tech infrastructure and ecosystem such that we can further drive access to affordable and quality healthcare services and pharmaceutical supply chains. Right now, we cover just under 14 million people and we are looking to in the next couple of years, be able to cover over 100 million people through our network of facilities which we work with. A lot of what we do is about enabling seamless access to good quality healthcare services and investment will go into that drive. That is basically what the fund was raised for.
When you go to a hospital or a pharmacy there are long waiting times they are struggling with. The goal is completing that service paradigm
What would you say are the prospects for the handshake between technology and the health sector in Africa and especially in the Nigerian market going forward?
I do not think you are going to have a situation where tech replaces pharmacists and doctors. That is not the thrust. I speak to a lot of founders in the healthcare scene, we meet very often and speak about what people are thinking and how we can drive the sector. I do not think the thrust of anybody is to replace the pharmacies. We are not saying that all of a sudden you are going to be in your house and just press a button and drugs come to you. These drugs are potentially harmful and poisonous and they need to be given under the supervision of healthcare professionals.
A lot of these drugs need to be taken under supervision. Tech is removing those frictions that exist in our society today. When you go to a hospital or a pharmacy there are long waiting times they are struggling with. The goal is to complete that service paradigm such that patients can get the best out of the healthcare services we have.
From structural under-resourcing for the space to financing challenges to geographical access challenges. When I talk about structural issues in regards to health care talents, you find that health care talents are bunched up in certain cities in Nigeria. In some cases, you have a healthcare distribution of talents that approaches fairly global standards in terms of distribution of healthcare professionals while in some you find the distribution of healthcare professions that is abysmal for emerging countries. Tech is the great enabler and one of the most efficient and frictionless ways to enable access and that is what the drive is for us at Drugstoc.
We see tech as a way to empower the healthcare provider to enable him to leverage his capabilities to provide more services. In the traditional life, he would reach over 100,000 people and touch 100,000 lives. With tech, we can increase this 100,000 to 500,000 or 1 million people. That is the way we at Drugstoc see the healthcare industry and that is the way we approach it. There will always be a need for that gateway function of the healthcare profession. What I do see is an enabling and empowering of the healthcare providers that currently practice.
You talked about structural issues and challenges before. Are there other challenges that Drugstoc faces in the health-tech sector at this time and how have you been able to navigate them?
So, when it comes to structural challenges and challenges affecting Drugstoc, I think the challenges are not unique to Drugstoc and I think they are universal across Small, Medium, and even large-scale businesses. The challenges include the typical infrastructural challenges. Power is a big issue for everybody, also, the road network.
I am sure you know people who have emigrated to Canada or UK in the last couple of years and that is a constant issue faced by the sector. Team members are also being head-hunted not just from Nigeria but also from more advanced economies. There is also that challenge. What we tried to do is create a work environment where people are able to give their best in a drama-free way.
Work is already hard as it is in Nigeria and Lagos, so we don’t need that sort of drama or anything that distracts you. People should be able to bring their best. This is where you spend most of your working time during the day. So, we want to make it as comfortable as possible. We try to get employees and team members to feel as comfortable as they can within the ambiance of the resources we can provide of course. We give team members the autonomy and the ingenuity to pursue their dreams as much as everybody can because if you force your team members to work on something they are not really interested in, then they are wasting their time and the company’s time also.
