01
Repository
Holds what happened, with its provenance attached
Ndlela
One health record that follows the person.
South African healthcare software is organised around institutions. A practice system serves a practice, a hospital system serves a hospital group, a scheme application serves a scheme. Each holds a fragment of one person’s health, and the person is left to carry the rest between them.
Ndlela is organised around the person instead.
01 The problem
Nothing holds the interval.
When somebody who should return in six months does not, no system notices. The practice’s software recorded what happened, not what should have happened next. The scheme sees a claim that never arrived. The person remembers, or does not.
That gap — between one episode of care and the next — is where this platform sits. It is not a consulting room, a laboratory or a dispensary. It is the thing that holds the state in between, which nobody currently holds.
02 What it is
One record, reached from every direction.
A single health record belongs to the person and their household. Every other party reaches the same record from their own side: the clinician treating them, the practice coordinating their care, the pharmacy dispensing to them, the laboratory returning a result, the hospital admitting them at two in the morning, the community health worker visiting them at home.
The record assembles itself from what already gets typed. A consultation, a script, a dispense, a result, a discharge summary — each is recorded by somebody who was going to record it anyway. Nobody is asked to enter their own history from memory, and nobody has to open an application for the record to grow.
03 Four roles, and no fifth
What it does, and where it stops.
There is no fifth role, because a fifth would mean authoring a clinical opinion, and a clinical opinion belongs to somebody who can be held to it.
02
Conduit
Carries a document to where the person sent it
03
Messenger
Tells somebody that something happened
04
Facilitator
Makes an act easier — asking, booking, sharing, validating
That restraint is not modesty. It is the reason a practitioner, a laboratory or a hospital would hand a stranger a patient’s data at all.
04 Three paths
If you are a practitioner or a practice
A history that arrives before the patient does. A view of who has been lost to follow-up — the surveillance that lapsed, the result nobody chased, the chronic patient who stopped collecting. Referrals that come back answered. Repeats, bookings and certificates that stop being telephone conversations.
It adds nothing to your day. The consultation happens in the system you already use. Nothing is replaced and nothing is migrated.
If this is your family’s record
One record that goes where you go — a child’s immunisations, a parent’s medicines, your own history — surviving a change of doctor, scheme, town or employer. An emergency summary a stranger can actually open. One place that says what a visit cost, and what the scheme actually paid.
No medical scheme required. Cover decides who pays a practitioner. It does not decide who has a health history worth holding.
If you are a partner, a funder or an investor
A published contract by which other software connects, so an integration is a week rather than a quarter. Clinical content authored and versioned by the professional bodies responsible for it, rather than by us. And a written design record that says why every decision was taken and what is still open.
Get in touch. There is a good deal more to show under an agreement.
05 What it deliberately does not do
Some of this is defined by what it refuses.
| It does not consult, diagnose, treat, dispense or test | Those belong to the professionals and organisations registered to provide them |
| It sells no position in any list | Search results are ordered by distance. There is nothing to buy that would change them |
| It targets nothing on health status | Nothing is put in front of anybody because of what is in their record |
| No machine-learned model produces any clinical output | Clinical behaviour is a published rule set, authored by a professional body, versioned and dated |
| It handles no practice billing, claims or tariffs | Which is also why it is not competing with the software a practice already runs |
| No money moves through it for care | Not a consultation, not a test, not a script |
| It does not reconcile, rank or score anybody’s records against each other | Two sources disagreeing is information. Deciding which is right is a clinical judgement with an owner |
06 Governed by the professions
The clinical content is not ours.
Pathways, intervals, thresholds and instruments are authored, versioned and approved by the professional body or the programme responsible for them. They arrive by one of three routes — brought in from a system that already runs them, typed in by the body that wrote them, or adopted by reference from whoever registered them first.
There is no fourth route. Nothing clinical originates here, and no version is published without somebody named to answer for it.
07 Built for this country
Built for how care actually happens here.
South Africa has some 65 million people, and roughly six in seven have no medical scheme cover. Most care happens in a queue.
It works when a practice has never heard of us. A person can hand their record to any practitioner by a link, with no account on the other side and nothing to install.
It works with no signal. A community health worker completes a full visit offline and it reconciles when the phone finds a network.
It works with no smartphone. The messaging channel carries reminders to people who install nothing at all.
It works at two in the morning, at a facility with nothing installed, for somebody who cannot be asked.
08 Screens
In build.
Three screens from the working design. There are rather more.
09 Where it is
Not open yet.
Ndlela is in build and is not open to the public. Nothing here is a live service, and nothing on this page is an offer of one.
If you are a practitioner, a practice, a professional association, a programme, a technology partner or an investor, and you want to see more — write to us.
Or write to hello@ndlelahealth.com