Oliver van Veen warns fragmented medical data fuels dangerous drug interactions, missed diagnoses, and perpetuates racial bias in AI-driven medicine
A global health technology executive has called on the Nigerian government to urgently adopt an electronic health record system capable of creating "digital twins" of patients, warning that continued reliance on paper-based medicine is costing lives and deepening systemic inequities.
Oliver van Veen, CEO of Vannin Healthcare, described Nigeria's current approach to medical record-keeping as fundamentally reactive—waiting for symptoms to appear or crises to occur rather than predicting and preventing them.
"For too long, medicine in the region has been reactive. Waiting for symptoms to appear, for pain to become unbearable, or for a crisis to occur before intervening," van Veen said in a recent interview. "This is sick care, not healthcare. But a revolution is beginning" .
From Paper to Prediction
Van Veen cautioned that most Nigerians misunderstand what modern electronic health records can achieve. "When people hear 'electronic health record,' they often just imagine a digital version of paper—a PDF on a screen. This is a profound underestimation of the technology's potential," he said.
A true state-of-the-art system, like the architecture Vannin Healthcare is building with partner Greencube, does not simply store data—it synthesises it. Van Veen drew an analogy from engineering: a digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical asset, like a jet engine, used to simulate performance and predict failure before it occurs.
"In healthcare, the concept is even more powerful," he explained. "It is a dynamic, evolving profile of a patient that integrates everything: their genetic history, their lifetime of lab results, their radiology scans, and even real-time data from wearables" .
The Fragmentation Problem
Van Veen painted a stark picture of the current reality for the average Nigerian patient: consultations with a general practitioner in Surulere for malaria, a specialist in Ikeja for hypertension, medications purchased from a pharmacy near the office—none of these interactions connected to any central record.
"Each doctor is operating with only 20 percent of the puzzle," he said. "This operational blindness leads to dangerous drug interactions, redundant testing, and missed diagnoses" .
The solution, he argues, is unified EHR infrastructure implemented in centres of excellence across the country. "By doing this, we can ensure that every interaction—from the lab technician to the surgeon—feeds into one central, secure profile. The data follows the patient, not the hospital" .
The Bias Imperative
Perhaps the most urgent argument for building digital twins in Nigeria, van Veen suggested, is the risk of medical bias as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into healthcare.
"The world is rushing toward artificial intelligence in medicine. But AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on," he warned.
Currently, the vast majority of global health data used to train AI comes from Caucasian populations in Western Europe and North America. "Applying a Boston-trained AI to a Lagos patient is fraught with risk. Diseases present differently across populations. Genetic markers vary. The way cardiovascular disease or certain cancers manifest in West Africa can differ significantly from how they manifest in the UK" .
Without robust, locally sourced data, Nigeria risks importing not just technology but the biases embedded within it—potentially exacerbating health disparities rather than reducing them.
A Call to Action
Van Veen's intervention comes at a critical moment for Nigeria's healthcare system, which faces mounting pressure to modernise while serving a population of over 200 million with limited resources. The transition to electronic records has been slow, hampered by infrastructure deficits, funding constraints, and competing priorities.
But the stakes, van Veen argued, could not be higher. Every day Nigeria delays, more patients receive care from doctors working with partial information, more opportunities for early intervention are missed, and more clinical data that could shape the future of African medicine is lost to dusty shelves and unconnected files.
The revolution he describes is not hypothetical. It is already beginning elsewhere. The question is whether Nigeria will lead or follow as healthcare enters its digital age.
Posts
0 Comments