Datalab co-hosted the Health Data Monetisation Workshop with Alternata, sponsored by Snowflake, on 25 March 2026.
The event brought together healthcare providers, medical schemes, insurers, and data leaders to explore how South Africa’s healthcare ecosystem can collaborate more effectively around data.
From data monetisation to data value realisation
South Africa’s health ecosystem holds enormously valuable data, including claims, pharmacy transactions, wellness signals, and clinical outcomes.
The workshop shifted the conversation from data monetisation alone to a broader idea: data value realisation.
The central theme was that data collaboration can drive shared value across the ecosystem, improving decision-making, creating richer context for AI and machine learning, and supporting better patient outcomes.
Secure collaboration in practice
Reza du Plooy and Douglas Day from Datalab demonstrated what secure data collaboration can look like in practice.
The discussion explored how organisations can collaborate responsibly while addressing the key requirements of healthcare data sharing:
- Governance
- Privacy
- Compliance
- Consent
- Clean rooms
These considerations cannot be treated separately. They are all essential if healthcare data collaboration is to be done properly, ethically, and legally.
The role of Snowflake
Snowflake provides the platform capabilities to make secure collaboration possible through its focus on easy, trusted, and connected data.
This includes data clean rooms, data masking, row-level security, privacy policies, data sharing, Snowflake Marketplace, and Snowgrid.
Data as an asset
The workshop reinforced the idea that data itself is an asset, and that AI needs collaboration to reach its full potential.
"The future of healthcare analytics will belong to organisations across verticals where there is a clear connection between collaboration, patient outcomes, driving down cost of care, and improving the healthcare system."
For Datalab, the event reflected the importance of combining strategic advisory with technical implementation to help organisations move from data potential to practical value.