(Middle East and Africa) Vukosi Sambo, Executive Head of Data Insights at Afrocentric Group, speaks with David Atkinson, VP, Data and Analytics at Sun Life, in a video interview about how Afrocentric facilitates care using data, communicating value, and the importance of data storytelling.

Afrocentric Group is a large and diversified healthcare group in South Africa focusing on medical aid administration and health risk management. Sambo heads the business data insights team and he believes that data by itself is meaningless. According to him, the real magic is in creating meaning out of data to create data insights that support a business.

Sambo mentions that Afrocentric facilitates access to care to ensure the best healthcare outcomes and experiences. Adding to this, he states that it is a data company that is only focused on the data of care.

Speaking of value metrics for outcomes, Sambo mentions the following fundamentals:

• Analyzing data to understand people’s health and wellness to create targeted and personalized solutions for every one of the nearly 4 million customers
• Delivering care most affordably, to continue to be sustainable and cost-effective while expanding access
• Using data to understand and predict conditions for people and remove unnecessary procedures, understand fraud, and wastage
• To provide unique customer experiences and servicing that are supported by the best technologies
• Providing doctors with data to understand patients better and deliver the best service

When asked about how he communicates the value being delivered through data and analytics, Sambo points towards data storytelling. He says that the organization has around 26 million monthly interaction points that create data. It then uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to filter out stories that are meaningful from the various combinations of the data points.

Sambo elaborates that storytelling brings structure into the system and telling stories in an impactful order empowers users to make decisions. He adds that if the storytelling appeals to the users there will be higher levels of adoption in the drive to democratize the use of data with business users.

CDO Magazine appreciates Vukosi Sambo for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.