Healthcare Tech Trailblazer, Toyin Ajayi is Passionate About Making Healthcare Easy and Accessible.
Nigeria boasts of some of the most prominent women in Tech in Africa and around the world, women like Odun Eweniyi, Ized Uanikhehi and Toyin Ajayi, the co-founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, a tech-enabled, value-based healthcare service for Africans
Dr Ajayi was Chief Medical Officer of Commonwealth Care Alliance, a famous integrated health plan and system of healthcare delivery for people qualified for Medicare and Medicaid, before joining Cityblock.
In this capacity, she directed multidisciplinary teams of clinicians, community health workers, and administrators. She also led clinical operations and innovative care delivery strategies. Stanford University awarded Dr Ajayi her undergraduate degree, while the University of Cambridge awarded her an MPhil and her doctorate.
Dr Ajayi, board certified in Family Medicine, completed her residency training at Boston Medical Centre and now practices primary care focusing on patients with chronic, complex, and end-of-life needs. She has published and spoken extensively about her work in caring for populations with complex needs, including at TEDMED, NCQA, and HLTH, as well as in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Toyin Ajayi is passionate about making health care easy and accessible to everyone, particularly marginalized groups. She makes this clear in an interview with Catherine Shu for TechCrunch.
"Do I believe that healthcare is a right that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay, and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” She said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022 that we’re looking at the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about healthcare disparities, healthcare outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID. Everyone's like, ‘Oh my god, Black and brown people are dying more from COVID…We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently, and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.”
Cityblock Health is a technology-driven provider for high-need communities. It focuses on investing upstream in highly personalized, prevention-oriented health and social care to reduce costs and improve outcomes in the long run. Its technology enables scale by combining useful information, coordination, and communication for its members and care teams.
During COVID-19, Cityblock developed a model to assist organizations in determining which of their members are at high risk. Cityblock Health became a health-tech unicorn after raising $160 million in a Series C funding round in 2020 and making Toyin the first Female founder of a Tech Unicorn of Nigerian Descent.