Enter telemedicine, a growing technology that closes the gap between facilities for the patients who need the care the most. In a nutshell, telemedicine allows doctors, often specialists such as cardiologists, oncologists and the like, to examine patients in other facilities remotely. This might involve hospitals in big cities like Mexico City or Buenos Aires partnering with smaller towns around the country. Or hospitals in the U.S. and Europe can also take part in order to help these smaller communities.

It’s a novel, cutting-edge idea that’s not only a great partnership for medical facilities, but also a vital tool for the health and well-being of patients.

Many healthcare providers and institutions have caught on to this. As a result, the Latin American telemedicine market’s value is projected to grow with a CAGR of 17.2% between now and 2020 to reach US$2.5 billion—more than double its 2015 value of US$1.13 billion.

The growth of telemedicine is not altogether surprising given that many other high-tech sectors of LatAm healthcare are also expanding, including devices and electronic medical records (EMR).

Taking Advantage of the Telemedicine Boom in LatAm

For manufacturers that provide telemedicine equipment and devices, it’s easy to determine what areas might be interested in your goods and services. Global Health Intelligence provides a rich database of hospitals and other medical centers throughout Latin America that either presently use telemedicine or have the need for telemedicine equipment.

And this opportunity is not simply a good one for manufacturers of the equipment. If hospitals in the U.S. or other parts of the world are interested in partnering with a Latin American facility, for example, the GHI database can help with this, as well. Many facilities have telemedicine equipment but are lacking in good partnerships, so this is a great opportunity for North American or European hospitals to get involved.

Finally, once a facility has telemedicine, they may be interested in other high-tech equipment such as PACs (picture archiving and communication systems), PET scanners and other devices to provide their patients with the best care possible. This is yet another sales opportunity for equipment manufacturers.

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Contact GHI today for a free demo of HospiScope, our Latin American hospitals database, which covers nearly 90% of the region.

A quick tour will let you see how to take advantage of the telemedicine trend to identify a wide array of new prospects among institutions that are likely to need high-tech equipment.

Global Health Intelligence (GHI) has changed all that.

Since 2013 we’ve focused on compiling the world’s largest Latin American hospitals database while also tracking data on other aspects of the LatAm healthcare industry. As a result, medical device/equipment companies operating in Latin America now can populate their CRM systems with a wealth of detailed data to further help them identify and leverage sales opportunities.

Below you can download a case study that explains how a leading global player in medical devices used GHI’s hospital database for its CRM system.

DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

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After reviewing the case study, contact GHI for a free demo of our database.

You’ll get a direct sense of how your sales team can integrate our deep data with your CRM to uncover loads of new opportunities.

These days, it may not be enough.

Global Health Intelligence built a database covering nearly 90% of the hospitals in Latin America, and in Colombia, we cover 74%. For each hospital in Colombia (and every other country) that we profile, we include more than 130 data points—especially what kind of medical devices and equipment that hospitals have. With this knowledge, a sales and marketing teams for medical devices/equipment firms in Latin America can see where hospitals are overstocked and, more importantly where they have the biggest needs.

Knowing that—as well as who to contact for purchases, which we also include in the database in many instances—your team can then identify strong prospects and sell.

Below you can download one of our fact sheets for Colombia that breaks down data on beds, rooms, different types of medical devices and equipment, IT infrastructure, procedures performed and more.

That will give you a basic idea of the data, but if you schedule a 30-minute demo with GHI, you can see for yourself how quickly this high-tech tool can uncover a slew of sales opportunities in Colombia and in many other Latin American medical device markets.

• Build personal contacts
• Pitch prospects one by one
• Be active in trade shows to increase brand awareness
• Keep at it

That’s pretty much been it. Different approaches, particularly those involving data to drive targeting, just weren’t possible. The available data for Latin America on capital equipment, medical devices, consumables, PACs, RIS and other categories was either unavailable, incomplete or extremely out of date. So the typical push made perfect sense.

Now it makes a lot less sense.

Global Health Intelligence (GHI) built a team to do all the important digging as far as purchases and imports of different types of medical supplies and equipment in LatAm for nearly 90% of the hospitals in the region, not to mention quantifying the market share of different companies in different categories. This means you can take a much more strategic, informed approach to spiking sales. While it’s great to see medical devices sales going up 8% YOY in Mexico and sales surging with infusion pumps and capnography equipment, that general data isn’t as helpful when you don’t know who has the greatest need—and how to reach them. With this in mind, here’s how to increase your sales of medical equipment in LatAm using a data-driven approach.

#1: Drill Down to Find Opportunities

Your sales team obviously knows who they want to target based on previous experience—they bought product A before so they’ll probably need more soon. But what if casual touching base with your clients doesn’t reveal a need in another area—simply because your client doesn’t handle that area and doesn’t know? Yet if you could call up a hospital’s equipment purchases in the past year with a few quick clicks, you could see opportunities that you never even thought of…because they never came up in client conversations before.

#2: Plan Strategically with Greater Precision

When it comes time to map out strategy for next year and how much to commit to different parts of the budget, many sales and marketing teams know what they’ll do…and at the same time, they don’t know. They don’t often have hard data on what’s happening in different areas that can help them figure out how much to allocate in marketing/sales or which areas they should target more in the coming year because there’s a need. Instead, they rely on feel—their impression of what’s happening based on what they’re seeing and what their clients say. This could be valid when you have an experienced team in place—but why not add objective data to be sure that your team’s feel for the market is solid?

#3: Strengthen Your CRM

There no question that a good CRM software like Salesforce can streamline your customer relationships and strengthen marketing campaigns. But why limit yourself to ONLY your data? By integrating your CRM with GHI’s hospitals database, you synchronize your contacts and their buying habits with identified sales needs based on real-world equipment counts so you can further increase the efficiency of your targeting and cross-selling via CRM, not to mention making your marketing efforts more targeted by basing them on real-world needs from rock-solid data.

#4: Power Your Propensity Analysis

This approach tries to predict customer behavior by using variables and isolating out who among your customer base is most likely to buy. While there are a number of great tools out there for running a propensity analysis, the strength of your results are only as good as your data. As with CRM, why base your analysis on just your internal data? If you can incorporate real-world sales results from real-world behaviors for dozens of categories, you’ll be able to identify many more prospects with proven needs you can meet.

NEXT STEPS

Contact GHI for a 30-minute demo to see how our tool can help you get started with these 4 approaches and jump-start your numbers ASAP. Just tell us where you want to improve and the challenges you have. We’ll show you how easy it is to get your answers and then apply them to your sales strategies. While tried-and-true is fine for an approach, there’s always value in trying a new approach based on a true picture of the market—and that’s what we can give you.

While most of it is structured best for subscribers who use it for propension analysis and to uncover new sales opportunities, there are any number of basic data points that can be helpful for all kinds of Latin American healthcare professionals. With them in mind, we’ve created what we expect to be the first in a series of infographics on Latin American hospitals and healthcare so that our fellow professionals have a quick and handy resource for reference.

Click below to download GHI’s Latin American hospitals infographic.

The theft in medicines has led to the loss of approximately USD2.7 million and, also contributes to the rise of illegal trade of these products in the open market (street vendors and internet). About 4% of the medicines sold in Mexico are irregular (1.5% are for sale on the Internet and 2.5% in markets on wheels or illegal establishments), all of which represents approximately USD440 million a year.

The Unefarm, the authorities of the Federal Commission for the Protection of Health Risks (Cofepris) and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) work in coordination to report the theft of lots of merchandise and detection of irregular market or web pages without the corresponding certificate. The Unefarm stated that from 2013 to date the federal authorities have suspended about 17,000 illegal advertising advertisements linked to health, of which 67% are on the internet.

The organization mentioned the existence of an international agreement between health agencies of Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay and Central America, in coordination with Spain, to combat this type of sites and, other agreements with portals such as Free Market and Second Hand for monitoring, in collaboration with the Cyber ​​Police.

In the last year alone there were at least 50 robberies and assaults to pharmacies in the eastern area of ​​the state of Mexico and Mexico City, reason why the entrepreneurs have had to resort to the purchase of Insurance policies, alarms and closed circuits of surveillance, but has been insufficient.

Aristeguinoticias

An example of this is the antiretroviral Kaletra, for the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which Abbot sells in Mexico at a price of USD2.96 per pill, which amounts to more than USD2,100 annually.

World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that about 700,000 people die in Latin America every year due to lack of access to medicines. Families in the region spend an average of 30% of their income on health issues. The AHF emphasized on promoting early detection of the disease to curb HIV epidemic.

Currently, only 60% of HIV positive people in Mexico are aware of the available treatments. Government can provide treatment only if the authorities can buy generic medicines at more affordable prices. The organization urged the Mexican government to take advantage of the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Additionally, pharmaceuticals prefer to extend their patents on medicines to generate profits at the expense human life. It was suggested by the AHF that patient organizations be included in meetings where governments and pharmaceutical companies discuss reductions in drug prices.

Noreste

As per the Colombian Immigration Agency records, the number of international passengers travelling for healthcare services, has grown by 22.9% every year (6,281 tourists in 2012 to 14,339 tourists in 2016).

The cities such as Bogotá, Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bucaramanga attract the largest number of international patients who are looking for quality care in healthcare services in the fields of ophthalmology, cardiology, dentistry, neurology, and oncology etc.

A report by Procolombia states that healthcare services in the country are approximately 40% cheaper than in the United States. Besides that, the geographical position of the country is an advantage with its access to a whole continent and highly trained human resources, additionally, international organizations such as Joint Commission International have certified five hospitals for their patient care standards. As per the ranking provided by América Economía, Colombia has 22 hospitals that are listed among the best hospitals in Latin America.

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To uncover sales opportunities within the Colombian market for capital equipment, medical devices, PACS, RIS and more, contact Global Health Intelligence to learn more about our hospitals database, which tracks more than 130 data points for more than 15,000 hospitals in  Latin America. You can also see which are the best-equipped hospitals in Colombia with our newly released ranking.

The AI market in the health field is booming, supported by Silicon Valley giants and emerging companies. The market has been estimated to reach USD6.6 billion by 2021. The market is anticipated to have a double digit accelerated growth of 62.2% between 2016-2022.

The data collection is mainly via smartphones and other connected objects that the companies are developing. Companies like Cardiogram are creating applications that can detect arrhythmias in users of smart watches. The company uses the clock’s sensors and an algorithm to distinguish a normal heart rate from an atrial fibrillation which can lead to a heart attack. University of Harvard and university of Vermont created to tool to identify cases of depression by analyzing the photos published on the Instagram network. Google (Alphabet), is developing its departments’ DeepMind using AI to help doctors assess the risks of cancer spread and develop appropriate radiotherapy treatments.

Other big companies involved in developing AI tools are IBM, Medtronic, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Sentrian, Healthsense Inc, Propeller Health, Buoy Health, etc. Most new startups use machine learning and predictive analytics. Currently, North America leads the AI healthcare market, followed by Europe. India and China in the Asia Pacific region have the highest potential for growth.

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Sign up for our LatAm hospitals database today to find out about tech capabilities of more than 15,000 hospitals in Latin America: rock-solid, dependable data for making decisions and spiking your sales with detailed knowledge that uncovers opportunities. These kinds of insights can give you a better understanding of AI tools being used in Latin American hospitals. We can also go further with custom research that will further let you see the gaps your equipment can fill and thus drive revenues.

To fill this gap, Global Health Intelligence (GHI) decided to delve into its database (which covers 86% of all hospitals in Latin America and now includes Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay) to analyze which hospitals have the highest equipment counts in 4 specific categories:

• Patient care (number of beds)
• Diagnostic imaging equipment
• Cardiovascular equipment
• Maternity unit equipment

These four categories are critical pillars when evaluating patient care. The number of beds within an institution is often an indicator of the size of the hospital and may be correlated to the level of care. Diagnostic imaging equipment is essential to properly diagnose any number of life-threatening and chronic conditions. Cardiovascular equipment is just as important given the prevalence of heart disease in Latin America. A majority of births take place in hospitals and birthing is one of the main activities of most hospitals, which denotes significant importance to maternity units and infant care. While additional categories could have been included, GHI decided to focus on these 4 areas of care in order make the ranking more manageable.

Why Multiple Categories and Countries?

Rankings are often all-encompassing with no specific focus, such as the “The 50 best hospitals.” Given the complexities of healthcare systems in place and the context in which they operate, GHI opted to acknowledge these characteristics by creating a ranking per leading category. This also enables smaller yet more specialized hospitals to form part of the ranking.

GHI applied the same plurality by setting up the rankings per country in order to reflect local market dynamics accurately. For example, Brazil has over 200 million people and over 7,000 hospitals. It would be an unjust comparison to include Brazilian hospitals alongside those of Peru, for instance, a market that’s 10 times smaller.

Rankings for the Best Equipped Hospitals

The best-equipped hospitals in Argentina
The best-equipped hospitals in Brazil
The best-equipped hospitals in Chile
The best-equipped hospitals in Colombia
The best-equipped hospitals in Dominican Republic
The best-equipped hospitals in Mexico
The best-equipped hospitals in Peru
The best-equipped hospitals in Puerto Rico

Dive Deeper

This GHI ranking will give you an initial sense of which Latin American hospitals are best-equipped. But that’s just a surface view. It takes a deeper dive into the data to understand which market segments have the best potential to drive your revenues.

You can get this deep dive by subscribing to our database , which quickly lets you use data visualization tools to see which hospitals have the biggest needs and what those needs are. Parsing that is what will uncover opportunities for your sales team and allow you to grow your revenues in different markets. Check out this video to understand how the database can help drive new and existing revenue streams. Then contact GHI directly for an even deeper sense of how our database can be the perfect tool for your sales team.