Client Profile
EMGuidance is a MedTech company that provides healthcare professionals with instant access to up-to-date medical guidelines. With more than 100 000 registered users, it is the largest Healthcare Professional platform in South Africa. EMGuidance also has a smart digital scripting app and an online learning platform for continuous professional development for healthcare professionals.
The Challenge
EMGuidance’s business model leverages the platform’s behavioural usage data. In 2024 alone, users engaged more than 150 million times with the platform by looking up clinical guidelines, patient education resources, ICD-10 codes and drug information. The fast growth in the volume and complexity of behavioural usage data led to EMGuidance’s existing data toolstack becoming prohibitively slow. Moreover, the cloud bill was getting out of hand and its technical team was frequently pulled away from generating analytics for its corporate clients to fixing data pipelines and upgrading server capacity. Hence, EMGuidance needed to regain the power to produce meaningful analytics with a leaner, more scalable data platform.
Our Approach
We built a modern data platform on Google Cloud using Cloud Scheduler, Compute Engine, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Storage, BigQuery and Dataform. ELT workflows are orchestrated via Cloud Scheduler and run on Compute Engine. CI/CD is managed with GitLab, triggering Cloud Build to deploy code and manage dependencies stored in Artifact Registry. Raw data is stored in Cloud Storage, with analytics handled in BigQuery. Dataform is used for SQL-based transformation and model management. This fully automated, modular setup ensures reliable deployments, reproducible pipelines and scalable data operations within a serverless, cloud-native environment.
The Impact
The shift from the old to the new platform has had a profound, positive impact on EMGuidance’s ability to deliver valuable reports for the healthcare sector. The new data warehouse and on-demand serverless compute can resolve complex queries on large datasets in 5 minutes, where this used to take the old toolstack 50 minutes. An even large cause of time-saving stems from the unified view of the profile and behavioural usage data of healthcare providers, which enables EMGuidance to produce accurate insights faster. Lastly, and importantly, the cloud bill is now 85% lower than before the migration to the new platform.
“We needed to figure out a way to grow our business without letting our data infrastructure cost grow at the same rate. We set a benchmark of 30% reduction in cost, and with the help of the Wimmy team, we smashed that out of the park.” - Nathier Kasu, Chief Operating Officer
