Why Nigeria’s health system needs people who speak both “clinic” and “cloud”

By Tosin Clegg

As conversations around Nigeria’s digital health future continue to swell, a Nigerian public health professional and SaaS specialist, Chiamaka Ihemanma, has issued a bold reminder: the country’s health system will not advance without people who can speak both “clinic” and “cloud.”

When we talk about “digital health” in Nigeria, the conversation often jumps straight to apps and funding rounds. We forget something more basic. Technology only works if someone can stand in the middle and translate between the clinic and the cloud.
I say this as someone who has lived on both sides.

My foundation is public health. I studied Public Health at Adeleke University and later completed a Master’s in Public Health with Distinction at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. I started out as a public health intern at a teaching hospital in Lagos, working on outreach programmes for young people around sexual health, mental wellbeing and substance use. Those campaigns reached more than 200 residents and increased participation by about 20 per cent when we improved our messaging and logistics.

Today I work in a UK local authority as a Public Health Officer, where my team uses tools like EMIS, Power BI and Excel to track vaccination and cancer screening rates street by street. We have used data to raise MMR vaccination from 87 to 90 per cent and breast screening from 90 to 91 per cent in our borough.

In the last two years I have also pivoted into software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales, working with teams that sell cloud-based products to health and public sector organisations. That means I now spend a lot of time in meetings with clinicians, IT leads, procurement officers and founders, explaining why a new tool is worth paying for and how it will actually fit into existing work.

From that vantage point, I see a gap that matters for Nigeria.

On one side we have health workers and public health graduates who understand patients, communities and disease patterns, but who may feel intimidated by tech or commercial language. On the other side we have software founders who can build platforms but may not fully grasp the realities of a primary health centre in Agege or a state hospital in Aba.

We need more people who can speak both languages.

If Nigeria wants to build a real health-tech ecosystem, not just isolated apps, three things should happen.

First, train public health and clinical students in basic digital and commercial skills.
A graduate in public health should be comfortable reading dashboards, questioning data and sitting in a product meeting, not only in a ward round. Universities can add modules on product thinking, SaaS business models and health data standards to existing curricula.

Second, encourage SaaS founders to hire domain experts into sales and customer-success roles.
The most successful deals I have seen in the UK happen when the person in front of the client understands both the pressure of clinic waiting rooms and the logic of subscription pricing. Nigeria’s health-tech startups should recruit nurses, public health officers and hospital managers into commercial roles, not treat them only as “advisers.”

Third, design pilots that prove value in weeks, not years.
Hospitals and ministries are rightly cautious. In my SaaS work I have learned that clear pilots, simple metrics and honest reporting build trust. Nigerian buyers should insist on this discipline, and Nigerian vendors should embrace it.

Nigeria does not lack smart developers or passionate health workers. What we lack are enough translators who can hold both worlds in view and make them work together. My own journey from clinic floors to council dashboards to SaaS sales has convinced me that this middle ground is where real change happens.

If we invest in people who can speak “clinic” and “cloud” at the same time, we will waste less money on the wrong tools and move faster towards a health system that is smart, humane and fit for the future.