She gave up her childhood dream of becoming a doctor to fix what doctors cannot

When Dami Oyenekan watched a patient die waiting for care in the emergency ward at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), she realised a hard truth: even the best doctors are helpless when the system behind them is broken. Instead of putting on a white coat, she chose to build the infrastructure of medicine. Today, after building quality engineering and AI systems at Medtronic, Cleerly, and Google Health, she leads AI initiatives at GE HealthCare, engineering the exact healthtech solutions she once wished existed. In this week’s edition of My Life in Tech, Dami shares with JOHN ADOYI her journey from witnessing systemic failure in Lagos to building the future of global healthcare and digital records.

In April 2012, 14-year-old Oluwadamilola “Dami” Oyenekan thought she was catching a glimpse of her future.

For years, she had insisted she was going to be a doctor. When Greensprings School, a private school in Lagos, sent its Year 10 students on an “experience week” career placement, Oyenekan knew exactly where she wanted to go.

Her father, however, had a different plan. Rather than placing her in a comfortable private hospital, he insisted she spend her two-week placement at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH). He wanted her to see the unfiltered reality of public healthcare in Nigeria.

Within two days, Oyenekan was calling her father to pick her up.

It wasn’t that she found medicine too difficult; it was the systemic helplessness. She watched patients wait hours for care while stretched-thin doctors struggled with limited resources. In the emergency ward, she witnessed a patient die while waiting for treatment, followed by the agonizing sight of a doctor comforting the grieving family.

“The person was gone,” Oyenekan recalls.

The tragedy raised a question that would ultimately redirect her life: What happens when even the best doctor lacks the infrastructure to do their job?

“I realized that even if I went to the best medical school and became a top doctor, returning to that same setting meant I couldn’t do my best work without adequate support,” she says. “There were gaps doctors couldn’t fill on their own, gaps where technology could serve as the bridge.”

Finding her true alignment

Despite her realization, Oyenekan still wanted to give medicine a fair shot. She moved to the United Kingdom in 2014 to pursue her studies. During a career talk, she approached a visiting physician and secured a two-week shadowing internship at Maidstone Hospital in Kent.

There, inside an NHS operating room, came her final turning point. While observing a procedure to insert a subdermal implant into a patient’s arm, she had to look away.

“I realised, I can’t look at this. I don’t want to be here,” she says.

The UK had world-class resources, but clinical practice simply was not her calling. She wanted to transform healthcare at a system level.

In 2015, Oyenekan moved to the United States to attend the University of Minnesota. Unlike the British system, the American university curriculum allowed her to explore psychology, biological sciences, and various engineering disciplines before declaring a major.

She eventually found the exact intersection she had been searching for: Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, a field that applied advanced engineering principles to biological systems and healthcare delivery.

From campus leader to corporate quality engineer

At Minnesota, Oyenekan built her community through the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). Joining in her second year, she rose to Vice President in her third year and Chapter President in her fourth.

Navigating a college where Black students were a small minority, Oyenekan focused on visibility, academic support, and corporate pipelines. Under her presidency, the chapter organized study nights and corporate mentorship programs, winning the university’s Student Group of the Year award for the first time.

Her leadership opened major corporate doors. In 2018, Oyenekan was selected for Genentech’s prestigious G-Links program, which selected roughly 25 students out of 500 applicants nationwide to pair with senior corporate executives. Paired with the company’s Vice President of Quality, Oyenekan spent three months as a regulatory intern, mastering clinical trial documentation, quality engineering, and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) compliance frameworks.

“That exposed me to quality in biotech,” she says. “It ended up laying the foundation for my entire career.”

By her final year, her work with NSBE paid off again. At an NSBE national conference, where nearly 80% of her attending chapter members secured internships or full-time offers, Oyenekan interviewed with executives from global medical technology giant Medtronic.

Upon graduating in 2019, she joined Medtronic full-time as a Quality Engineer in Sunnyvale, California.

Pivoting from hardware to AI and software

At Medtronic, Oyenekan spent two years in the gastrointestinal and hepatology division, ensuring minimally invasive medical devices met strict FDA regulatory standards.

“Anyone can develop a device,” she explains. “But there are strict requirements around how that device is developed, documented, and traced, from the moment raw components arrive to final testing.”

In 2021, seeking to transition from hardware to software and artificial intelligence, Oyenekan joined Cleerly, a healthtech startup that uses AI to analyse coronary CT scans to detect early heart disease. Over nine months, she adapted her hardware quality engineering framework to suit the fast-paced development cycles of AI healthcare software.

Her work caught the attention of Google Health, which recruited her as a Software Quality Engineer. At Google, she worked on the Automated Retinal Disease Assessment (ARDA) program, an AI tool designed to screen for diabetic retinopathy in low- and middle-income countries across Asia.

The role gave Oyenekan a broader lens, showing her how healthcare technology could be designed and deployed outside Western regulatory ecosystems.

End-to-end impact at GE HealthCare

While at Google, Oyenekan pursued a master’s degree in Medical Product Development Management. Wanting to move beyond quality compliance to shape product strategy, she targeted technical program management.

In May 2023, she joined GE HealthCare as a Technical Program Manager focusing on artificial intelligence. In this role, Oyenekan oversees AI healthcare initiatives end-to-end, managing product development, compliance, and execution simultaneously.

Her work at GE HealthCare has also involved collaboration on global health initiatives supported by the Gates Foundation, providing crucial insights into how large-scale international health projects are deployed.

Returning to the source

Every stage of Oyenekan’s career—from Medtronic and Cleerly to Google and GE HealthCare—has been deliberate preparation for a single goal: returning to address the healthcare infrastructure gaps she first saw as a 14-year-old at LASUTH.

“I want to come back and tackle the lack of infrastructure I witnessed firsthand,” she says.

While optimistic about the promise of AI in African healthcare, Oyenekan emphasises that African nations must not remain passive consumers of technology built elsewhere.

“African countries need to be active participants in that revolution, as opposed to just being on the receiving end,” she stresses. “We need to be involved in generating the data used to build these technologies and shaping the systems around them.”

That conviction centers on digital health infrastructure and data interoperability.

In Nigeria, patients still carry paper folders from hospital to hospital because systems do not talk to one another. Oyenekan advocates for a unified digital health architecture centred on a simple outcome: one patient, one record.

Fourteen years after walking away from clinical medicine at LASUTH, Oyenekan’s journey has come full circle.

“I had one goal, and I initially thought becoming a doctor was the only path to it,” she reflects. “I’m on a different path now, but it’s still leading to the exact same destination.”

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