Founder Spotlight: Tobi Bosede
Tell us a bit about your company.
Ilekun Health is a technology company on a mission to empower people to make smarter decisions around their health with smart technology. We glean insight around provider quality, services offered, and pre-insurance price from a complex deluge of unstructured health data using artificial intelligence (AI). The insight we produce is easy to consume and publicly available to patients through our website which is backed by rich data from our API. This API is available for licensing by organizations such as insurers, employers, and health systems.
Why did you start Ilekun Health?
For years, I would ask for referrals from friends and family to find a health provider, but like most people, my close friends and family have limited insight into the healthcare system. To gain a more comprehensive understanding, I would often end up going to my insurance website to search for providers, then cross-reference those results with sites like Google reviews and ZocDoc to get a sense of quality. Next, I would visit provider websites and call their offices to find a price. This time-consuming process frequently yielded unsatisfactory results, so I was not much better off than when I started.
I felt like I was making the critical decision of choosing a health care provider based on arbitrary and incomplete data. Despite my best efforts, I found myself dissatisfied with the care I received and, in multiple cases, found myself with surprise bills well after I thought I had paid for my treatment. I am not alone. The patient experience for many is terrible and hard to navigate with a quarter of Americans foregoing healthcare due to price.
However, the difference between other patients and myself is that my professional experience lies in the nexus between healthcare and data science, which showed me that the patient experience does not have to be terrible. Finding quality information does not need to be gathered manually from obscure sources. There is an opportunity to make healthcare data accessible to consumers and to help them better navigate the complex healthcare system to achieve better results. So I created Ilekun Health, a platform that helps simplify a consumer’s decision-making process while bringing a new level of transparency to the industry.
What are your learnings from 2020?
Ilekun Health was born in the coranavirus pandemic and in eight months was able to launch an MVP, acquire users, and raise funding. This impressed upon me the learning that now is a good time as any to start a company. There’s never going to be a perfect time to do something you’ve always wanted to do.
Follow Ilekun Health, or connect with Tobi for updates on Ilekun’s progress!
