From Tech Support to Tech Builder: Why I'm Building CareCoach

I've spent the past five years searching for my place in African healthcare. I've worked on different solutions, pivoted multiple times, and constantly asked myself: what problem am I uniquely positioned to solve? About a year ago, I thought I'd found it—my perfect fit, the healthcare solution I was meant to build.

Then reality hit me harder than I expected.

The problem wasn't with my solution. The problem was that my solution, like so many others in Africa's digital health space, was built on a faulty assumption: that healthcare workers were ready to use digital tools. They weren't. And it wasn't just affecting my plans, it was affecting healthcare digitization across the entire continent.

My wake-up call came by recalling my time as Tech Support at Primed E-health, where I trained over 200 healthcare workers on using electronic medical record systems. I walked into that role expecting to teach people how to navigate software. What I encountered was far more fundamental. I met healthcare workers who didn't know how to operate smartphones properly. Nurses who'd never used a computer. Doctors who were brilliant clinicians but had never needed to interact with digital interfaces in their daily work.

I watched a nurse with 15 years of clinical experience—someone who could diagnose conditions I'd never heard of—freeze completely when faced with a login screen. I saw the frustration in her eyes. The embarrassment. The defensiveness that comes when you feel incompetent at something everyone assumes you should know. She wasn't incompetent. She was untrained. And she was far from alone.

That experience changed everything for me. I realized that no matter how brilliant our digital health solutions were—whether EMR systems, telemedicine platforms, or health analytics tools—they would all fail at the same point: the human interface. We were building sophisticated tools for a workforce that hadn't been prepared to use them.

At my HealthTech company, NexaVida Health Technologies, we made a decision just two weeks ago that feels both terrifying and absolutely necessary. We're building an AI platform specifically designed to train African healthcare workers on digital health systems. We're calling it CareCoach.

CareCoach works in two ways. First, it functions as a real-time AI assistant that guides healthcare workers as they use digital systems while attending to patients. Think of it as having an experienced colleague looking over your shoulder, offering hints and support exactly when you need them, but without the judgment or impatience that often comes with human training. Second, it provides training simulation modules that facilities can use to onboard new healthcare workers, train medical students, and give their workforce a safe space to practice before working with actual patient data.

We're already in discussions with three potential EMR partners, with two actively working on integration. The vision is ambitious but clear: create a digitally literate healthcare workforce in Africa that can efficiently make use of digital health tools, thereby saving more lives.

The irony isn't lost on me. I started in healthcare trying to solve clinical problems. I ended up realizing that the most critical problem isn't clinical at all, it's educational. It's about meeting healthcare workers where they are and giving them the tools and confidence to step into a digital future.

Because here's what I've learned: Africa's healthcare workers aren't resistant to digital transformation. They're hungry for it. They just need someone to show them how, with patience and without judgment. That's what we're building with CareCoach.

The perfect fit I was searching for? It was right in front of me the whole time, in the eyes of every healthcare worker who wanted to learn but didn't know where to start.

References

For context on the digital health challenges mentioned:

[1] PMC - Digital health systems adoption challenges - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12437165/

[2] WHO Africa Region - Healthcare workforce training gaps - https://www.afro.who.int/sites/default/files/2025-09/AFR-RC75-9 Status of public health and emergency workforce in Africa.pdf