Unjani Clinics: Empowering Data-Driven Primary Care
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The Challenge
Unjani Clinics is a Non Profit Company, on a mission to empower black women by building a sustainable network of sustainable, nurse-led primary care clinics in South Africa. The group is on a growth path, with a target of having 500+ care settings by 2031. The network of Unjani Clinics is growing fast, and so is the volume and complexity of the decisions to be made. As a healthcare organisation, they cannot afford to make bad decisions on behalf of their patients, nurse-owners or funders. To avert the risk of analysis paralysis, Unjani Clinics needed to leverage the power of Data First: fast, accurate insights from internal data, in a way that gives clear and objective guidance to strategic and operational decision-makers. Accordingly, Unjani Clinics developed their own, bespoke electronic health record system.
The challenge, however, was to turn this rich and constantly growing database into meaningful analytics, in an automated and scalable way.
Our Approach
Unjani Clinics made a strategic investment in state-of-the-art data infrastructure by partnering with us at the beginning of 2024. Our role was to build a robust data platform, perform a range of analyses of their data, and present the results in a suite of live interactive data dashboards.
We set up automated data pipelines to let data flow from various sources, including Unjani’s proprietary electronic health records system, into an enterprise-grade data warehouse. This foundation enabled rapid queries and swift data analytics development. Through interviews with members of the executive committee, we identified dozens of metrics that captured the operational, clinical and financial reality of the clinics in a nuanced way.
Within 6 months, we were able to deliver 22 live, interactive and self-service data dashboards. By taking a modular, scalable and agile approach to the design and implementation of the solution, we were ready for Unjani Clinics’ ever-evolving needs. Whether new clinics are onboarded, new data sources come online, new metrics are introduced or new dashboards are commissioned, the platform can deliver.
Case and Point
Recently, Unjani Clinics embarked on a new project requiring the swift integration of additional data sources. Health promotion officers (HPOs) started collecting biometric and survey data through a community-based intervention, and community members who scored poorly in the screening tests were referred for further investigation and care.
To monitor and evaluate the success of the intervention, a new dashboard was required. With the existing platform, we were able to analyse the necessary data and deploy a comprehensive dashboard in just 5 business days. This is 3 to 5 times faster than the industry standard, and we delivered the dashboard for roughly half the cost usually incurred in the industry.
Our ability to deliver quickly and economically stems from our streamlined processes and the strategic foresight of Unjani Clinics. By templatising design and deployment phases, and by maintaining lean operational costs, we provide high-quality services that are both fast and affordable.
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What We Learned
Breaking the Iron Triangle Investing in a state-of-the-art data platform has proven to yield high return on investment for Unjani Clinics. Their focus was not on minimising initial costs, but on maximising the long-term value that can be extracted from their investment.
Our solution challenges the classic iron triangle of project management (cost, quality, speed).
Together, we demonstrated that with the right strategic investment, it is possible to deliver high-quality results fast, and affordably. Thanks to the new data platform, Unjani Clinics is now in a position to act on data-driven insights swiftly: inefficiencies in healthcare delivery are diagnosed and addressed faster. This means health is “produced” in a leaner way, and more health can be produced with the same budget in a shorter amount of time.
Investing in a tailored data platform not only mitigates upfront costs but also enhances long-term value. Unlike the traditional project management trade-off between speed, quality, and cost, our approach optimises all three, by prioritising lifetime return on investment over short-term cost minimisation.
“The dashboard gave improved visibility of the programme and allowed us to see clearly how HPOs were performing. We were able to manage them more effectively thanks to the real-time data and evidence. Because of the dashboard, we were able to conduct performance meetings based on performance metrics. We were able to measure actual working days, identify idle working days and take appropriate action where necessary.”
