A Nigerian hospital once agreed to roll out a new electronic medical records system with full backing from its management. Doctors were briefed, consultants were looped in, and the directive
A Nigerian hospital once agreed to roll out a new electronic medical records system with full backing from its management. Doctors were briefed, consultants were looped in, and the directive came from the top. Within weeks, the rollout had collapsed. Doctors quietly went back to paper charts, consultants ignored the new workflow entirely, and the project that had cleared every executive approval died at the point where the actual work happened.
Medismarts, founded in 2015 by Obinna Osuji and Damilola Oni, was the health-tech company behind the system. They shelved it and started again.
That failure sits at the centre of how Medismarts (which claims 20+ clients per its website) now talks about building software for healthcare, and it says more about the industry than any of the company’s growth numbers do. Healthcare technology in Nigeria does not fail for lack of ambition or funding. It fails because hospitals are not single-user environments, and software built for one type of user rarely survives contact with the rest.
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Why Medismarts says hospital software breaks where consumer apps don’tA consumer app answers to one person. A hospital platform answers to doctors who need speed, nurses who need accuracy under pressure, administrators who need compliance records, finance teams who need claims to reconcile, and HMOs who need the whole chain to be auditable. Each of those users has a different definition of what the software is for, and a product that satisfies one group while ignoring the rest tends to get quietly abandoned rather than formally rejected, which is exactly what happened with the electronic medical records (EMR) rollout. Executive sign-off had convinced Medismarts that adoption was settled. The doctors on the floor had never been asked.
That gap between deployment and adoption is where Medismarts has since built its actual product philosophy, according to the company. Rather than treating a signed contract as the finish line, the company now treats the period after go-live as the harder half of the work, since that is when the software either fits into existing clinical routines or gets worked around.
The company’s platform now connects providers, HMOs, and claims processing into a single operational chain, and the scale it points to reflects that shift.
According to Medismarts, the platform processed an average of roughly 798,000 healthcare claims annually across a sample of four HMOs in 2025, with June 2026 alone accounting for an average of about 67,600 claims across the same group.
For one of those HMOs, the company said 17,697 of 18,859 submitted claims were processed in 2025, a completion rate of close to 94%. Medismarts said regulatory reporting on this data happens at the level of each individual HMO or client rather than through the company itself, though it did not specify which regulator its partners report to.
Numbers like these are easy for any vendor to produce. What is harder to manufacture is independent confirmation that the platform actually holds up inside the institutions using it, and that is where Medismarts’ HMO partners carry more weight than any internal figure. An IT infrastructure manager and a service centre lead at one partner HMO, along with the executive director at a second partner HMO, have each spoken to the platform’s reliability in day-to-day use, offering a version of validation that comes from people with no stake in how the company presents itself publicly.
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The lesson Medismarts draws from its own EMR failure is one that extends well past healthcare. Enterprise software in any regulated, multi-stakeholder industry in Nigeria runs into the same trap, where a founder mistakes a signed deal or an executive endorsement for proof that the product will actually get used. The people who determine whether software survives are rarely the people who approved it. They are the people who have to open it every day, and building for them is a slower, less glamorous discipline than building for a demo.
Medismarts is still mid-story on that discipline. The EMR rollout that failed was not the end of the company’s ambitions in that part of the market, and the operational numbers it now shares suggest a platform that has grown well beyond that early misstep. But the more durable insight is not the scale. It is the reminder that in healthcare technology, and in enterprise software generally, the hardest problem was never the engineering.
