From Four Hospitals to AI-Guided Care: The Netcare Digitalisation Story

When Netcare listed on the JSE in 1996, the group was little more than a head office of eighteen people, four hospitals and a single clinic. Three decades later it is South Africa's largest private healthcare provider, and its most recent regulatory submission — an AI algorithm designed to flag life-threatening deterioration in ICU and high-care patients before it happens — is as good a marker as any of how far that journey has travelled.

Scale first, then screens

Netcare's early growth story was about footprint, not software. The group expanded into the UK market in 2001 to provide services under contract to the National Health Service, and in 2006 took a controlling stake in General Healthcare Group, owner of BMI Healthcare, then the UK's largest private acute hospital operator. At home, growth continued through the 2000s and 2010s, including the 2016–2018 integration of the Akeso mental health network, which added 19 clinics and positioned Netcare to build integrated behavioural health services across its hospitals.

For most of this period, technology was infrastructure rather than strategy. That changed in 2018, when outgoing group CEO Dr Richard Friedland launched what Netcare has described as a ten-year transformation strategy: digitising the group's entire network — its roughly 49 hospitals, more than 60 primary care centres, emergency services and mental health facilities — as the foundation for a longer-term shift toward "person-centred health and care" that is digitally enabled and data-driven.

COVID-19 as accelerant

The plan might have unfolded gradually had the pandemic not intervened. Like most health systems, Netcare took a severe financial knock from COVID-19, and the response was to accelerate rather than retreat. In 2021 the group formalised Netcare Digital, a joint venture with digital innovation lab A2D24 headed by group CIO Travis Dewing, built specifically to fast-track health technology. By the time of its launch, the partnership had already supported more than 11 million COVID-19 screenings, and it used that momentum to push into telehealth and practice management — areas Netcare had identified as ripe for disruption.

The clearest product of that push was Netcare VirtualCare, a secure platform for video consultations with doctors that rolled out to more than 60 sites across all nine provinces, alongside a digital practice-management system for occupational health that went live at over 70 sites. Where a hospital visit had once been the default starting point for care, Netcare began positioning telehealth as an equally valid front door.

Building the patient's digital front door

Parallel to VirtualCare, Netcare rebuilt its consumer app into what it called a central repository for patients' medical information. Early versions handled emergency geolocation via Netcare 911 and an ambulance tracker; later releases added digital pre-admission, appointment booking integrated with Netcare Appointmed, digital medical certificates and prescriptions, and a "Summary of Care" record patients could view or share after a hospital or emergency department visit. More recent updates have layered in real-time updates for family members during a hospital stay, CareNotes for post-discharge recovery guidance, and — most tellingly — clinical AI-generated summaries that give patients accessible, personalised information about the care they received.

The throughline across all of this, in Netcare's own framing, is a move away from siloed, episodic treatment toward "ongoing engagement-led" care: fewer disconnected visits, more continuous digital contact between patient and provider.

From records to prediction

The next phase of that strategy is prediction rather than documentation, and it is where this month's news fits in. Since 2023, Netcare has partnered with TCC Clinical Solutions GmbH, a German clinical AI manufacturer led by intensive-care specialist Professor Christian Storm, to develop an artificial neural network that analyses continuously monitored vital signs — heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate — to predict clinical deterioration before it becomes clinically obvious. The algorithm builds on the established quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) score used to flag risk of sepsis, cardiac arrhythmia or respiratory failure, and was tested over several years by researchers from Netcare, TCC, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and DigitalOn Tech.

Following a successful clinical study in Netcare's ICU and high-care units, the group has now applied to the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) both to license the algorithm and to become its South African distributor. TCC and Netcare's Professor Reitze Rodseth, head of clinical data innovation and research, say further models are already in development: one to predict renal failure or the likelihood a patient will need mechanical ventilation, including after discharge, and another to calculate the probability of readmission to critical care following an ICU stay.

A strategy that outlasts its architect

The AI submission arrives at a moment of leadership change. Friedland, who co-founded Netcare and led it since 2005, hands over to incoming CEO Melanie da Costa at the end of 2026, with the board crediting him for embedding digitisation, data and AI-driven innovation as the group's long-term strategic identity rather than a side project. In its most recent interim results commentary, Netcare described its "strong digital foundation" as the platform from which it now intends to scale a further phase of innovation — one aimed less at digitising records and more at using them to anticipate clinical risk.

Read against that arc, the TCC partnership is less a standalone AI headline than the logical endpoint of a path Netcare has been on since 2018: digitise the network, put patients in continuous digital contact with their care, and — finally — use the resulting data to see trouble coming before a clinician would.