Healthcare innovator shares three principles for success

The CEO of Quadcare, Dr Dulcy Rakumakoe, was only six years old when she saw her grandmother struggle to make the journey to fetch her medication. It prompted her to study medicine and later to become an innovator in the healthcare space to bring accessible and affordable healthcare to more South Africans.

She has been described as a trailblazer in accessible healthcare and was the winner of the 2020 Santam Woman of the Future Award for her innovative healthcare model, which has led to 15 clinics being opened in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo. The clinics offer basic health services as well as medication and specialist referrals. It has been a challenging but rewarding journey and Dr Rakumakoe believes there are three main principles that have contributed to her success: the right skills, the right people, and and understanding of your context.

• Don’t underestimate the importance of financial acumen
• Appoint the right people
• Understand your market

One of the biggest challenges she faced early on was when she was defrauded by an accountant. ‘That’s when I did my MBA to ensure that I understood all of the accounts and financial statements!’ Dr Rakumakoe says that while the business now employs another accountant, she is more confident about her financial abilities.

Most recently, she completed the Future-Proof Your Healthcare Practice programme with Henley Business School. ‘As a growing business, we are always innovating and thinking about how to improve and develop our offering. It was wonderful to meet other medical practitioners also thinking about the future and how to better manage businesses and serve communities.’

She enjoyed the emphasis on data collection and analysis and how this results in better record keeping and improved services for patients. It also ensures the clinics operate more smoothly. Patients at Quadcare clinics don’t wait longer than 15 minutes to see a healthcare practitioner and if they do, it is flagged in the system and immediately addressed.

A key learning was how to use the AI notetaker in clinical consultations, which allows the medical officer to build a better rapport with patients, while gathering data. This enables Quadcare to use data analytics to better understand both its overall patient profile and individual patients. ‘We can see what percentage have chronic conditions and what they are, how often they visit and at what times for instance, which helps us improve the service.’

The right team consists not only of skilled and experienced employees but also of people who have the right values and mindset. In a healthcare context, this means they must be compassionate and caring. ‘If there is one superpower I think an entrepreneur needs to develop, then it is to attract the right team,’ reflects Dr Rakumakoe.

Some of her team have been with her since the beginning. But others have come and gone. The team she has now is amazing, she says. ‘I am walking this journey with people who will go to war for me.’ There is a marketing team, a communications team, as well as administrative staff, nurses, and clinical practitioners.

Quadcare has had to close or relocate some clinics that were opened in locations that were not suitable. In some areas, patients were distrustful of new healthcare operators. In other areas, the clinics were vandalised and damaged. Dr Rakumakoe learned the value of good market research in determining if community members were willing to pay the base fee of R499 per consultation, which includes not only the consultation fee but also medication. Patients must also be able to access the clinic.

But being able to offer affordable healthcare services is complicated. It was only by developing an innovative model that leverages technology to streamline the services of consulting medical doctors, clinical practitioners and nurses, that she found a way to bring costs down. The resulting process can be monitored closely and adjusted as necessary.

Dr Rakumakoe is excited about the future. She is not concerned about AI taking over the jobs of doctors. ‘For me, there is no fear. There is curiosity. I see the role of tech as making systems more efficient. Patients love the personal touch and talking to a human.’

She would love to open more clinics and eventually perhaps move from CEO to chairperson of the business. Her vision for the business and herself is clear, but it is founded on a deep and personally transformative journey of exploration into identity, survival and purpose, about which she writes in her memoir, The Fire Within. The book will be launched at Henley on 30 September 2026.

She says, ‘There was a time when I believed that success would protect me from pain. I thought becoming a doctor, building a business and achieving every goal I’d set for myself would somehow make life easier.’

Instead, she faced burnout and betrayal. The book details how she began the process of healing and became the person she is today. She says, ‘It is not a story about having the answers. It is a story about choosing to keep going.’

It tells the story of the healer who learnt how to heal herself – while helping to heal others.

Visit Dr. Dulcy – A doctor, entrepreneur and change-maker to order a copy of The Fire Within.