Leesi Saturday Komi Wins Nigeria Technology Award for Most Exceptional Telehealth Innovation Professional of the Year

By Ugo Aliogo

Dr. Leesi Saturday Komi has been formally named “Most Exceptional Telehealth Innovation Professional of the Year” at the Nigeria Technology Awards (NiTA), a nationally recognized platform that honors leading technology professionals, innovators, and organizations advancing Nigeria’s digital future. The announcement marks a defining moment in the country’s digital health landscape, positioning Dr. Komi as a central figure in the movement to use telehealth to close long-standing gaps in access to care.​​

In a ceremony dedicated to celebrating trailblazers in technology and innovation, NiTA conferred on Dr. Komi its top honor in telehealth innovation, recognizing his leadership in designing, implementing, and scaling digital health solutions that address some of Nigeria’s most persistent healthcare challenges. The “Most Exceptional Telehealth Innovation Professional of the Year” award reflects both peer recognition and public endorsement within the country’s broader technology ecosystem, aligning with NiTA’s stated focus on impact, innovation, and demonstrable results.​​

The organizers highlighted that this category honors professionals whose work goes beyond pilot concepts to deliver measurable improvements in access, quality, and continuity of care through technology-enabled platforms. In announcing the win, they pointed to Dr. Komi’s record of using telemedicine to connect underserved communities with licensed clinicians across borders, including his initiatives linking patients in Nigeria and Ukraine to remote consultations, triage, and follow-up care.​​

The award highlights years of work in which Dr. Komi has insisted that telehealth must be inclusive, multilingual, and designed around the realities of patients in low-resource settings. His advocacy for platforms that operate in Hausa, Yoruba, Pidgin English, and other locally understood languages reflects a conviction that technology should remove, not reinforce, social and linguistic barriers to care.​

Under his guidance, digital platforms have been deployed to provide video consultations, mobile-based follow-up, and community-driven health education, reducing both travel distance and out-of-pocket costs for patients in rural and peri-urban communities. Drawing from experience integrating telemedicine into clinical workflows at the International Multi Profile Clinic in Kyiv, he adapted these models to Nigerian contexts with limited connectivity, emphasizing low-bandwidth tools that remain functional where infrastructure is weakest.​

The announcement of the NiTA win prompted strong endorsements from public health experts who have followed and, in some cases, collaborated with Dr. Komi across multiple initiatives. Public health specialist Faith Evans described the award as “long overdue recognition” of a body of work that has “fundamentally changed the way frontline healthcare workers think about distance, triage, and continuity of care.” She emphasized that his telehealth programs did not simply transplant foreign models into Nigeria but were “rebuilt from the ground up” to align with local cultural norms, faith structures, and community leadership.​

Evans further noted that during the COVID-19 pandemic and in its aftermath, Dr. Komi’s frameworks for remote triage and follow-up “functioned as a safety valve” for health systems that were otherwise on the brink of overload, ensuring that patients with chronic conditions, maternal health needs, and mental health concerns could still access professional guidance without risking exposure in crowded facilities. In her view, the NiTA announcement “confirms what practitioners in the field have known for years: that Dr. Komi is one of the architects of a new, more resilient model of public health delivery in Africa.”​

Public health policy analyst Samuel Akinsanya framed the win as recognition of a system builder rather than a single-initiative innovator. He pointed out that Dr. Komi’s work ranges from hands-on clinical practice to the design of digital protocols, workforce training, and community engagement strategies that anchor telehealth within existing social structures. According to Akinsanya, this breadth is what distinguishes him in a crowded digital health space: “Many projects produce impressive pilots; very few produce scalable systems that survive beyond the initial funding cycle.”​
Akinsanya stressed that the award draws attention to the way Dr. Komi’s programs have integrated religious leaders, local NGOs, and community volunteers into health education and referral pathways, making telehealth a trusted entry point rather than an unfamiliar, external intervention. He also highlighted the importance of Dr. Komi’s peer-reviewed work on mobile clinics, faith-based engagement, and telehealth integration in crisis settings, noting that such scholarship “translates field experience into frameworks that policymakers can actually use.”​

Reacting to the announcement, Dr. Komi has consistently framed the NiTA recognition as a collective achievement rather than an individual triumph. He has stated that the award “belongs to every doctor, nurse, technologist, and community worker who believes that distance should never determine who receives care,” underscoring his focus on multidisciplinary teamwork and shared responsibility.​

He often explains his philosophy in simple terms: technology, in his view, “should never alienate; it should listen, adapt, and include,” a principle that has guided his insistence on culturally responsive and linguistically accessible telehealth platforms. In discussing the award, he has emphasized that telehealth is “not just a tool but a bridge”—a way of connecting people, knowledge, and hope across physical and social divides that have long limited healthcare in many parts of Nigeria.​

The NiTA announcement also shines a spotlight on the international dimension of Dr. Komi’s career. His experience as a primary care physician at the International Multi Profile Clinic in Kyiv gave him early exposure to digital documentation systems, coordinated care teams, and remote consultation models. During the height of COVID-19, he helped design telemedicine protocols, triage workflows, and digital monitoring approaches that protected vulnerable patients while maintaining continuity of services.​

These experiences later informed the frameworks he adapted for Nigerian communities with weaker infrastructure and different sociocultural dynamics. The award recognizes that his contributions are not limited to a single geography; instead, they demonstrate an ability to transfer and translate effective models across borders while reshaping them around local needs. This cross-context expertise is central to the case made by many of his peers that his work meets the standard of international impact in public health and telehealth innovation.​​

Behind the practical systems that NiTA has now honored lies an intellectual agenda that connects telehealth to broader questions of equity, resilience, and crisis response. Through peer-reviewed publications on mobile clinics, faith-based public health outreach, and telehealth integration in conflict and post-disaster environments, Dr. Komi has argued that digital health must be woven into existing community systems rather than layered on as a standalone product. These works offer implementable frameworks for governments, NGOs, and health systems seeking to build sustainable digital health infrastructure in fragile settings.​​

The NiTA announcement, therefore, doubles as recognition of thought leadership: it affirms that his influence operates both in the field and in policy and academic discussions about how to structure telehealth in complex environments. Experts such as Evans and Akinsanya have pointed out that this combination of scholarship and implementation is rare and crucial, as it allows innovations to be rigorously evaluated, scaled responsibly, and adapted to different national contexts.​

By declaring Dr. Leesi Saturday Komi the “Most Exceptional Telehealth Innovation Professional of the Year,” the Nigeria Technology Awards has not only celebrated an individual but also signaled a broader shift in how digital health is understood in the country. The win affirms that telehealth is central to strategies for achieving more equitable, resilient, and inclusive healthcare in Nigeria and beyond.​​

For Dr. Komi, the announcement is both a milestone and a mandate. As he has stated in response to the recognition, the work ahead involves advocating for national investment in broadband access, digital literacy, and policies that embed telehealth within universal health coverage frameworks, ensuring that “a mother in a remote community has the same digital doorway to care as a professional in a major city.” The NiTA award formalizes his status as a leading figure in that effort and anchors his contributions as part of the evolving story of how technology can be deployed in the service of public health.