Digital transformation at Unimed BH: how a tailored framework brought IT closer to business strategy

Unimed BH strengthens its organizational transformation with a clearer, integrated, results-oriented management framework

With 55 years of history, around 1.6 million customers, more than 5,400 cooperative physicians, and operations across 46 municipalities, Unimed BH is one of the country’s leading healthcare references.

In a context of market consolidation and accelerating technology, the cooperative has been expanding its innovation capacity to sustain growth, efficiency, and quality.

It is in this scenario that Unimed-BH has been strengthening its digital transformation by structuring a new management framework to connect strategy and operations with greater clarity, predictability, and adaptability. More than reorganizing technology workflows, the initiative aims to create a more integrated way of working between the business and technology, with stronger governance, better visibility into initiatives, and more consistent prioritization criteria.

When growth demands a new way to organize execution

The goal of the digital transformation was to organize ongoing initiatives, establishing a prioritization practice aligned with strategy and providing greater visibility into execution.

This is what Elmer Rodrigues, Digital Manager at Unimed BH, explains: “We operated in the traditional model: the business asked, IT executed. That didn’t bring visibility or clarity on what really needed to be done.”

A framework built for Unimed BH’s reality

It was in this context that the partnership with Meta became relevant. More than supporting an operational change, the consultancy came in to help structure a framework aligned with the cooperative’s reality, respecting the complexity of the healthcare sector and the organization’s particularities. As highlighted by Luiz Cruz, IT Superintendent at Unimed BH, “the partnership with Meta began in October 2024. They helped us organize the way we work.”

Elmer expands on this point, reinforcing the tailored nature of the build: “Meta was able to build with us a framework that worked for Unimed-BH. We operate in a regulated healthcare environment and needed something tailored to our scenario.”

This is one of the most important aspects of this case. It is not about applying a generic model, but about building a way of working that can respond to Unimed-BH’s concrete reality. Instead of simply reorganizing flows, the framework started to provide a clearer foundation to integrate areas, structure decisions, and make execution more consistent with the cooperative’s objectives.

More transparency, stronger alignment, and a new role for technology

As this new model advanced, the relationship between technology and the business began to change more deeply. The transformation did not simply bring more organization to workflows. It also repositioned the technology area within the company, expanding its participation in decisions and its connection to strategy. This change is reinforced by Elmer, who told us that “IT moves away from projects and project-based demands to product-based demands, where we stop being only executors and start being part of the strategy.”

At the same time, the new dynamic began to give business areas more visibility into what was being built and delivered. This transparency is an important gain not only in communication but also in governance. When the business can see more clearly what technology is doing, prioritization matures, decision-making improves, and deliveries are perceived more concretely in terms of their impact on the organization. In this sense, the framework strengthens the connection between strategic intent and practical execution.

Results: more agility, more predictability, and direct impact on the experience

The adoption of the new framework has already brought concrete gains to Unimed BH’s operation:

• 40% reduction in time to market;
• 85% schedule accuracy for technology teams’ projects and initiatives;
• Greater delivery agility;
• Less rework, with quality maintained;
• Increase in NPS from business areas regarding technology teams;
• Improvement in the quality of applications, products, and digital solutions;
• Direct impact on the experience of customers and cooperative physicians.

The results also began to appear more tangibly at the front line. With a more organized operation, greater integration between areas, and a more strategic role for technology, Unimed BH improves the quality of solutions delivered to the business and to the end customer. As Luiz states: “today the impact is on the quality of our applications, our products, our technology that is delivered inside medical offices, in the customer app. So this directly impacts service.”

More than isolated indicators, these advances show an operation that is clearer, more predictable, and more aligned with the organization’s strategy. The framework strengthens Unimed-BH’s internal foundation, improves delivery quality, and creates the conditions for innovation to reach customers and cooperative physicians with greater consistency.

A solid foundation to keep evolving

As Elmer highlights, “Meta’s greatest legacy is the installed capability.” In a structure that now operates with more than 400 people on the technology team, distributed across more than 30 squads, the major advance is not only the improvement in indicators but the consolidation of a foundation capable of sustaining continuous evolution.

This perception is further reinforced by the Digital Manager’s statement that Unimed-BH “can have a solid foundation so that we can do our four-month planning in a very sustainable way. So what Meta brings as a contribution is not only the framework built internally, but this installed base where we have full capability to keep going on our own from here on.” With this, Unimed-BH now has a more solid model to organize execution, review priorities, and sustain growth with greater autonomy and consistency.

A more mature, innovative, and integrated future

Looking ahead, the team’s expectation is to expand learnings and further mature this model within the organization. This vision reinforces the structural nature of the change. The framework is not seen only as a solution for a specific moment, but as a lever for the cooperative’s continuous evolution.

In this process, Meta is recognized not only for methodological support, but for the ability to build, together with Unimed-BH, a solution aligned with its reality. More than implementing a methodology, the partnership helped establish a sustainable structure capable of supporting the cooperative’s next cycles of growth and transformation.

In this way, Unimed-BH moves forward with a more mature and integrated foundation, prepared to expand its innovation capacity, strengthen its position as a technology reference in the healthcare sector, and continue delivering higher-quality work to cooperative physicians and an increasingly better experience to the end customer.