Not occasionally. Regularly. Same women. Same men. Same prescriptions. Same preventable strokes.
The drugs worked. The system didn't. The gap was the six weeks between hospital appointments, when no one was watching, medication was being skipped and blood pressure was quietly climbing.
I didn't wait for a lab grant or a co-founder or a government program. I started testing with what I had.
Experiment 1:
The WhatsApp Pilot (zero budget, zero code)
I gave 20 market women; traders, not healthcare workers, with basic feature phones one BP reading machine and asked them to WhatsApp me their readings every morning. I tracked everything in a Google Sheet. No app. No dashboard. No developer.
16 of 20 (80%) maintained consistent daily submissions for the full two-week period, from a market with unreliable electricity and no clinic nearby.
Cost of the entire experiment: ₦70,000 in BP cuffs and my time.
That result told me the behavior was real. The bottleneck was engineering, not patients.
Experiment 2:
Community Monitoring at Scale (1,000+ patients, free)
Through HyMAP; the Hypertension Mapping and Action Program and community pharmacy screenings, I have monitored over 1,000 patients at no charge. The goal was not revenue. It was clinical validation at scale: does the pharmacy-based protocol actually work when deployed across a real, messy, informal economy population?
It does. The data is now the foundation for the platform we are building.
Experiment 3:
Paid Product (9 patients, revenue from month one)
After validating the clinical model for free, I charged for it. Nine patients enrolled at ₦3,000/month. Both pharmacy partners reported +28% revenue increases. Neither has churned. Medication adherence in the paying cohort: 84% against a ~50% baseline.
Small number. But it answers the most important early question: will people pay for this? Yes.
What I Built From These Three Experiments: ChroniTrack Health
ChroniTrack converts community pharmacies into clinical-grade cardiovascular monitoring hubs. The insight perhaps obvious in retrospect, but obviously apparently unacted on is that pharmacies are 10× more accessible than hospitals in West Africa (1 per 5,000 people vs 1 per 50,000), patients already visit weekly and the trust already exists.
Instead of asking patients to change their behavior, I embedded the monitoring protocol into behavior they were already doing.
Current system (built on Zapier/Twilio MVP - no engineering team, no money):
Pharmacist measures BP using WHO validated protocol at each visit
Patient submits BP reading taken at home
Adherence tracked
Longitudinal data captured: BP time-series, adherence scores
Risk flags trigger hospital escalation before crisis
Aggregate results across all three experiments:
1,000+ patients monitored (free cohort- clinical validation)
9 paying patients, ₦3,000/month, revenue from month one (commercial validation)
84% medication adherence in paying cohort (vs ~50% baseline)
78% 3-month retention
2 ER visits prevented through early escalation
80% daily BP submission rate in Whatsapp-only pilot (behavior validation)
All of this was built with paper, WhatsApp, Google Sheets, and a Zapier/Twilio stack. No purpose-built software. No engineering hire. No institutional backing. While working a full time pharmacist job. I am building it all myself.. For now.
I am doing this with Just GRIT and WILLPOWER.