From paper to platform: Digital data transformations changing lives
Public hospitals are essential to the health of citizens and the economic wellbeing of the country. They are also among the largest employers in the healthcare sector. In 2024 and 2025, the South African government funded the employment of 9,300 new healthcare workers and 800 new doctors for public hospitals1. And this investment has a multiplier effect with additional jobs created through demand for other services such as food and cleaning and with reduced absenteeism and increased workforce productivity. However, many hospitals are still entirely paper-based, like patient records at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, which introduces lost files and lost time for clinicians and communities.
Mint partnered with Microsoft and the Gauteng Department of Health to change this story. This article shows what happens when digitization meets delivery with a dramatic drop in patient waiting times, a new youth employment model, and what happens when more than 800,000 files go from archive boxes to an AI-ready infrastructure.
What you will discover:
- A real-world example of large-scale healthcare digitization in South Africa
- Clear answers to how Mint helped reduce public hospital queue times using Microsoft Cloud
- Evidence of social impact via the Ubuntu youth employment model
- An explanation of how structured data unlocks future AI summaries for doctors
- The strategic value of turning unstructured data into platform-ready intelligence
Why is digitizing patient records important in South Africa?
At Chris Hani Baragwanath, the largest hospital in Africa, patients used to wait up to six hours to retrieve a file, before seeing a nurse or getting treatment. That’s one full workday lost per month for chronic care patients. And when you multiply that across thousands of monthly visits, the result is systemic inefficiency and real-world economic loss.
By digitizing more than 800,000 patient records, Mint has helped the hospital move from a paper-led process to a data-led platform which has saved time, protected patient information and created the foundation for smarter and faster care.
How did Mint digitize 800,00+ files in a year?
This transformation was about both cloud and community infrastructure. Through the Ubuntu Partner Programme, Mint trained and employed 100 local youth to scan, sort, correlate and quality check files. This enabled the digitization of more than three quarters of a million records in, well, record time.
The project became a blueprint for sustainable healthcare modernization which combined local employment, national impact and technology that scales.
What happens after digitization? AI-ready infrastructure.
Structured healthcare data means records can be searched, sorted, summarized and surfaced instantly. Now, at Baragwanath, patients provide their ID number and are immediately located in the system along with their full file history. But the real future lies in what comes next: automated summaries of medical histories for doctors.
Instead of paging through decades of mismatched folders, medical practitioners receive AI-generated overviews that outline past diagnoses, treatment plans, medications and chronic conditions, even adjusting what’s shown based on specialties like pediatrics or cardiology.
The solution forms part of a province-wide change of digital direction. Following the success at Baragwanath, Mint and the Gauteng Department of Health have now signed a second phase rollout across 24 more hospitals, with additional deployments already underway in KwaZulu Natal.
This scale-up reflects a broader shift in how cloud, AI and community models are used to drive socio-economic change and not just operational efficiency.
Data is healthcare’s most powerful prescription
When you connect infrastructure to insights and insights to impact, you get results that make a real difference. What started as a scanning project has become a platform for clinical intelligence, workforce upliftment and AI-driven care.
