SurgiFlow · Healthcare Matching Platform
Infrastructure for a two-sided marketplace - matching, onboarding, payments, and oversight in one place.
The problem
When a business runs on chats and goodwill, growth caps itself
South Africa has over 1,800 qualified doctors who are unemployed or underemployed. The Surgical Assistant exists to put them back into theatre, and to widen patient access to care. SurgiFlow is the engine that makes that possible at scale.
Plenty of operations work beautifully at small scale - a group chat, a shared spreadsheet, a handful of people who know how everything connects. Then volume grows, and that fragile coordination layer becomes the ceiling. Every new customer, every new team member, every payment cycle adds friction the people in the middle quietly absorb.
Interactive walkthrough - the problem, the system, and the platform in use.
What we solved
Five pain points, one system
Manual Team Coordination
One system replaces broadcasts, spreadsheets, and phone calls.
Onboarding & Compliance
New people join faster, with credential checks running automatically in the background.
Payment Visibility
Both sides of the marketplace see what is owed, paid, and outstanding - in real time.
Intelligent Matching
Ranking rules and logic surface the right person for the job.
Admin Time Saved at Scale
The operation grows without the admin team growing alongside it.
Compliance, the way it actually works
There is no public HPCSA register API, so we built verification as three layers: practitioner self-declaration at onboarding, one-click assisted verification for admins, and automated monthly re-checks with alerting. Compliance is handled the way the South African healthcare system actually works.
Results
What the platform looks like at scale
The Surgical Assistant placed joint third at the SAB Social Innovation Awards and is backed by grant funding from the Orange Corners Innovation Fund.
Implementation
How we got SurgiFlow live
Four phases, each one removing a layer of manual work the team used to absorb.
Discovery
Mapped the manual workflows and the cost of every handoff.
Build
Shipped the matching, onboarding, payments, and admin surfaces.
Launch
Migrated from spreadsheets and broadcasts to one live system.
Scale
Rebuilt on Claude Code to keep pace with what comes next.
Discovery
Mapped the manual workflows and the cost of every handoff.
Build
Shipped the matching, onboarding, payments, and admin surfaces.
Launch
Migrated from spreadsheets and broadcasts to one live system.
Scale
Rebuilt on Claude Code to keep pace with what comes next.
Behind the build
How it was built
The first version proved the model. When ambitions outgrew it, the platform was rebuilt on Claude Code - the same deliberate choice we now make for most of our work. We built SurgiFlow on an AI-native foundation, Next.js, Supabase, and Claude Code, chosen so the product can grow into AI features rather than bolt them on later. That foundation is also why it ships in days what used to take weeks. That speed only matters because the process behind it is clearly defined; the rebuild also set the foundation for bringing AI into the product itself.
The Surgical Assistant
Meet the team
Meet the founders of The Surgical Assistant, and hear about how their shared vision for equitable healthcare and greater opportunities for South African medical professionals led to the creation of SurgiFlow.
"Thanks to the team at riivo and Claude, we've managed to get through a number of sprints faster than we ever would have. We can't do it without SurgiFlow and riivo as a partner."
Running a marketplace on WhatsApp and spreadsheets?
That ceiling lifts the moment the coordination layer becomes a system. Let's talk about what comes next.