Corporate Documentary
DHIS2: Turning Health Data Into a Human Story
Turning a Complex Health Technology into a Human Story That Helped Drive Its Expansion Across Rural Health Facilities
The Challenge
Resolve to Save Lives approached SPS Media to produce a healthcare documentary production in Nigeria. A human-led documentary showcasing the impact of DHIS2, a digital health data management platform designed to help healthcare workers track and manage patients living with hypertension, particularly in remote and underserved communities.
This was the organisation’s first documentary of this kind. Beyond telling the story of the platform, the film needed to demonstrate its real-world impact and help build a case for expanding DHIS2 to more health facilities across Nigeria.
The challenge was to make a digital health platform feel human without allowing the technology to become the centre of the story.
Our Approach
We began with research and pre-production alongside the Resolve to Save Lives team, identifying health centres and communities where DHIS2 was already being used.
Rather than simply documenting how the software worked, we looked for the people whose lives and work had been changed by it.
We developed a shortlist of locations and facilities, followed by a structured set of pre-interview questions designed to uncover strong characters, personal experiences and meaningful stories.
The responses helped us identify the strongest contributors and shaped the narrative direction of the film. From there, we built the documentary around their real experiences, while ensuring the story continued to serve the client’s broader objective: demonstrating the value of DHIS2 and its potential for wider adoption.
This project demonstrated how the right storytelling approach can transform any CSR intervention into a story with significant audience reach.
Execution
We travelled from Lagos to Oyo State for a three-day production, capturing the people, healthcare facilities and environments behind the story.
One of the practical challenges was limited access to reliable electricity across several of the locations. Rather than allowing this to compromise the production, we adapted our approach and shot the entire documentary using natural light or available lighting with speed lenses.
This required careful planning around locations, time of day, camera positioning and available ambient light. It also allowed us to preserve an authentic visual quality that suited the documentary’s human-led approach and the realities of the communities we were documenting.
Our Role
SPS Media managed the project end-to-end. From research and pre-production through production and post-production. Ensuring the creative direction remained consistent from the initial interviews to the final film.
Result
The final documentary gave Resolve to Save Lives a human, relatable way to communicate the impact of DHIS2 beyond its technical capabilities.
By putting healthcare workers and patients at the centre of the story, the film helped demonstrate how better health data can support the management of hypertension in communities where access to healthcare can be challenging.
The film was subsequently used to support the expansion and introduction of the DHIS2 programme to additional health facilities in remote parts of Nigeria.
The Takeaway
Technology can be difficult to explain. Its human impact isn’t.
By moving the story away from the software itself and towards the people using it, we transformed a technical health-management platform into a documentary about access, care and real-world impact.