What’s next in modern healthcare | Aliyah Allie, X, Bigly Labs

In this episode of Between the Seams, Stitch President Junaid Dadan sits down with Aliyah Allie, Managing Director of X, Bigly Labs (Dis-Chem Group’s innovation hub), to discuss the high-stakes digital transformation of one of South Africa’s most essential retail organizations.

Aliyah pulls back the curtain on how Dis-Chem is tackling the country’s massive healthcare accessibility gap. They move beyond the protein powder aisles to dissect the “spoeg en plak” reality of maintaining 40-year-old legacy systems while building the health center of the future. Aliyah shares deep insights into their unique nurse-led clinic model, the intricate challenge of rebuilding pharmacy software that dates back to the seventies, and why purposeful friction—or "healthy conflict"—between innovation hubs and the mothership is the only way to move at the speed of customer expectation.

From the ethics of Agentic AI in clinical settings to the simple power of "dog-fooding", this conversation speaks to the importance of modernizing complex, highly regulated enterprise infrastructure without losing sight of the human on the other side of the counter.