Every second matters at Unimed Vale do Sinos, a member of Brazil’s largest healthcare cooperative network. Across hospitals, clinics, and care centers, staff manage complex processes, critical patient information, and countless moving parts every day.

The challenge isn’t just delivering patient care, but making sure the systems behind it work seamlessly. Unimed needed an IT foundation capable of keeping pace with the fast-moving demands of modern healthcare. What they lacked wasn’t ambition, but a way to turn innovation into action in a way that benefits everyone.

In 2023, Unimed adopted Mendix as their enterprise low-code platform. Fragmented systems, manual workflows, and slow development cycles were replaced by a unified digital ecosystem, empowering real-time clinical insights, scalable patient services, and a modernized workforce experience.

From Fragmented Stacks to a Unified Digital Strategy

Before Mendix, Unimed’s IT landscape was spread across three disconnected tech stacks—Python, Node.js, and PHP. Each stack required its own specialists, leading to bottlenecks, long delivery timelines, and inconsistent architecture.

Every new project raised the same questions:

• Which developer do we have available?
• Which language do they know?
• How do we fit the project into whatever stack they can use?

This fragmented environment also made governance difficult. With little visibility during the development lifecycle, issues surfaced late—often in production. Operational teams still relied on paper processes, and clinical staff had limited real-time visibility into patient flows.

Low-code became the antidote to Unimed’s biggest problems: speed, scale, and standardization.

“The shift from traditional coding to a low-code platform was really interesting, because it made the development process much faster and of higher quality” said Fagner Silva, a senior software developer at Unimed.

Even when evaluating alternatives like OutSystems, the choice became clear. Mendix stood out for its:

• Intuitive visual development
• Flexibility to scale across multiple hospital use cases
• Strong governance and architectural consistency
• Training tools that dramatically accelerated onboarding
• Cloud-ready, secure infrastructure
• Ability to integrate deeply with ERP and medical systems

The platform naturally aligned with Unimed’s way of working.

“We also needed something we could scale in the long term, where the cost of bringing in and training people wouldn’t be so high,” added Antonio de Padua, Information Technology Superintendent at Unimed. “With low-code, and especially with Mendix Academy, we could onboard someone and have them productive in a much shorter time. It made a huge difference.”

In 2023, Unimed partnered with TrueChange to establish a solid starting point: infrastructure setup, architecture guidelines, reusable components, and hands-on coaching.

“We supported them, trained the team, and prepared the environment. Now, they run by themselves. We helped them with their first challenges, but now offer more strategic and targeted support,” explained Tiago Farias, CEO at TrueChange.

With a clear framework in place, Unimed’s teams quickly realized how dramatically the platform could accelerate innovation. Delivery timelines dropped from 6–8 months to just 2 months on average.

Innovation no longer trickled. It accelerated.

A Virtual Breakthrough

Unimed’s first Mendix application—a virtual clinic check-in and vitals solution—became the inflection point. Built in just one month by a non-IT analyst, it demonstrated that high-impact, clinically integrated tools could be delivered faster than ever.

Patients now check in digitally, activate the scale, and transmit vitals directly to physicians, improving clinical readiness.

The impact was immediate:

• Staff no longer needed to manually check in patients
• Doctors received complete patient data the moment a teleconsultation started
• Manual steps were replaced with guided digital workflows

“When we look at the ERP platform they use, it’s a very large, generic healthcare system designed to serve every type of hospital and provider, each with its own differences,” explained Wilton Gallego, DevOps & SRE Manager at TrueChange.

That early success lit the fuse for everything that followed.

“Before, IT was seen as a bottleneck. Now, we’re seen as a partner that enables faster delivery,” de Padua emphasized.

Digitizing the Hospital Floor — From Paper to Real-Time Awareness

With momentum building, Unimed expanded Mendix from patient entry to the clinical frontline. Two core applications now support a fully digital, paperless hospital environment:

1.  Digital Infirmary Panels — A tool offering real-time operational intelligence for nurses and clinical staff capturing:

• Patient care flows
• Alerts for allergies, medications, or emergencies,
• Bed management and distribution
• High-flow notifications for urgent cases

“Everything recorded in the medical record system is shown on these panels,” da Silva said.

2. Digital Kiosk — Leveraged in emergency rooms that enable:

• Appointment verification via CPF
• Immediate scheduling
• Faster triage and reduced queueing

Beyond the hospital, Unimed digitized corporate services with an HR portal for health plan clients. This application streamlines employer-employee management, invoices, dashboards, and customization all built for scalability.

“This app has configurable rules, for example, company A and company B have different employee rules. We built this flexibility into the app using Mendix, allowing parameter changes per company,” da Silva added.

Stronger Governance, Standardization, and a Clear Architecture

As Unimed embraced Mendix development, governance and architectural discipline became core.

With the help of TrueChange, Unimed has created:

• UI design components
• Standardized architecture patterns
• Performance monitoring dashboards
• Scalability practices aligned with Mendix best standards

“We created dashboards, and they have all the monitoring of performance, links, database, everything with open-source tools. We brought them to a different level of monitoring the environment and they are happy with that,” Farias shared.

The impact extended to talent as well.

“Now we have junior professionals delivering complete applications. That’s a big gain for Unimed using Mendix,” da Silva said.

Shifting From Coding to Business Value

Perhaps the most profound transformation at Unimed is cultural.

Developers and analysts now spend more time understanding the business problem than writing code. Clinical teams participate directly in solution design. Innovation is faster, more iterative, and more grounded in real-world workflows.

Unimed no longer relies on heavy custom development or scattered technology stacks. Instead, they operate with a consistent platform that supports both rapid delivery and long-term maintainability.

“They trust in the architecture. They can take Mendix’s core strengths to deliver the applications for the organization and manage it by themselves. Unimed is now a well-oiled machine,” Gallego said.

A Proven Path to Future-Ready Healthcare

Unimed Vale do Sinos’ journey shows what happens when a healthcare organization steps beyond legacy constraints and commits to modern, scalable digital delivery.

With Mendix, Unimed has:

• Delivered 5 applications
• Built 30 microservices
• Modernized hospital operations
• Doubled the number of medical exams scheduled year-over-year

Most importantly, they have redefined how technology supports patient care.

“We no longer do traditional development. We only do maintenance and small functionalities,” de Padua emphasized.

Today, Unimed continues to expand its Mendix ecosystem, explore new digital services, and pursue a future where care is more connected, more efficient, and more human.