The National Orientation Agency (NOA) and Mobihealth International are collaborating on a national initiative designed to leverage telehealth, community engagement, and digital health innovation to improve access to quality healthcare for Nigerians, particularly those in rural, underserved, and hard-to-reach communities.
The partners, in Abuja on Friday, said that the collaboration is designed to create an integrated healthcare pathway that covers community mobilisation, health education, screening, teleconsultation, diagnosis and treatment, referral, and follow-up care.
Under the proposed Hybrid Community Telehealth Access Model, Nigerians will be able to access healthcare through multiple convenient channels, including NOA offices, primary healthcare centres (PHCs), community pharmacies, schools and tertiary institutions, community outreach locations, workplaces, and directly from their homes using mobile phones.
The initiative is expected to benefit communities where distance, shortages of healthcare professionals, long waiting times, and the cost of travelling to hospitals continue to delay access to care.
According to the partners, the initiative will be implemented in phases, with the ambition to scale across communities nationwide and contribute to Nigeria’s progress towards universal health coverage.
In executing the initiative, NOA will leverage its extensive grassroots presence and community mobilisation capabilities to drive health education, awareness, and engagement, while Mobihealth will provide the technology, telemedicine infrastructure, clinical network, and digital health capabilities required to connect citizens to healthcare.
Through Mobihealth’s digital health platform, citizens will have access to teleconsultations with qualified doctors and specialists, electronic prescriptions, remote diagnostics, referrals, health education, and continuity of care.
Representing the Director-General of NOA, Lanre Issa-Onilu, the Director of Health and Social Care, NOA, Dr Ayoola Abiodun Olufemi, commending Mobihealth for the initiative, said that the partnership is a timely and innovative intervention that will help address the critical shortage of doctors in the country, particularly in rural and underserved communities.
Dr Olufemi further said that by leveraging technology to connect Nigerians to qualified healthcare professionals, the partnership has the potential to significantly improve access to quality healthcare across the country.
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Olufemi noted that NOA has a presence in communities across Nigeria and a responsibility to ensure that citizens are informed, engaged, and connected to programmes that improve their lives.
“Through this partnership with Mobihealth, we will leverage our grassroots network and community mobilisation capacity to increase health awareness and connect more Nigerians, particularly those in underserved communities, to accessible healthcare services,” Olufemi said.
The Founder and CEO of Mobihealth, Dr Funmi Adewara, emphasised that access to quality healthcare should not depend on where someone lives or how far they are from a hospital.
Adewara said that the vision of Mobihealth is to make healthcare available wherever Nigerians are — at a PHC, pharmacy, school, NOA office, community outreach point, workplace, or simply from their mobile phone at home.
“By combining NOA’s extraordinary grassroots reach with Mobihealth’s digital health infrastructure, we have an opportunity to bring quality healthcare significantly closer to millions of Nigerians,” she said.
Adewara noted that the initiative aims to support universal health coverage and also support national healthcare priorities by expanding access to primary and specialist care, strengthening PHCs and community healthcare providers, promoting preventive healthcare and early diagnosis, improving the management of chronic diseases, supporting maternal, child, and adolescent health, and increasing digital health literacy.
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