Notes
Keeping 6,000 clinics online
Tobiloba Odejinmi · 12 Aug 2025 · 6 min · 298 words
Direct answer
If a clinic cannot open your system on a Monday morning, nothing else you shipped that week matters. Reliability is not a culture poster. It is whether a pharmacist can still serve a patient when your Slack is quiet.
- Downtime in health credit is a patient problem, not an engineering metric.
- You find out what is fragile only after real volume hits it.
- The runbook has to be readable at 2am by someone who did not write the code.
- Pretty dashboards do not replace a person who can explain the database.
Monday morning is the test
I have sat in reviews where someone showed a slide about uptime. Then a clinic called because a loan would not go through. The slide did not help. The person who knew the payment path did.
At 10mg Health we built the platform from zero. It now serves more than 6,000 providers and has put out $3.4 million in loans. Those numbers only mean something if the thing opens when a pharmacist needs it.
What we actually watch
You watch the paths that move money and the paths that let a provider log in. Everything else can wait. People love to instrument vanity. Instrument the thing a stranger will shout about.
- Can a provider start an application?
- Does the decision come back?
- Does the disbursement land?
- Can someone on the team say why it failed without opening six tabs?
Questions people ask
What made reliability different at 10mg?
The users are clinics and pharmacies. If the platform is down, a patient may not get treatment that day. That changes what you call an incident.
Is this about AI?
No. This is about the platform itself staying up. I write about AI employees elsewhere. This is the boring work that still has to be true first.
Written by
Tobiloba Odejinmi
Head of Engineering at 10mg Health. I have run engineering at Zeeh Africa and sold Insurpass and Shopl. I still write the code. If you have one process that still runs on people copying things, we can look at it in thirty minutes.
