In this first article we highlight two issues that have come to the fore over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic: crises in the health system, and opportunities that have arisen in the midst of the turbulence.

LESSON 1: Focusing on Preventive Diagnosis and a Primary Care Strategy to Have a Robust Healthcare System in the Long Term

The onset of the pandemic has shown us that our health systems were not ready to face a health crisis. The countries with most development or a greater capacity to respond—economically or technologically—managed to recover relatively quickly, but even so, they have reconsidered their health care and investment strategies, focusing heavily on developing primary-care systems with prevention and awareness-raising campaigns, replanning the health system, both public and private, and emphasizing preventive diagnosis. Latin America has suffered heavy human and economic losses through a lack of investment, which has been plain to see, and so this is now part of the agenda for governments and even private businesses.

In this regard, through HospiScope, GHI has come up with some very interesting data, confirming that in Latin America the total number of beds grew by 2.2% a year in 2020 and 2021, to reach nearly 1M beds in the region. Beds for outpatient use, on the other hand, have seen annual growth of 5.7% in 2020 and 2021, and beds for use in intensive care have grown by 16.4% annually in 2020 and 2021, to reach 90,000 beds at regional level. With respect to surgery beds, annual growth in 2020 and 2021 was 3.7%.

In addition, with regard to diagnostic apparatus, both in primary diagnosis and advanced-imaging diagnosis, the annual growth in 2020 and 2021 looks like this:

Our data show that the investment was in those diagnostic-imaging apparatus that are much more precise and give more specific results when it comes to determining pathologies. This is a sign of the way the industry has changed, and where the opportunities for growth and investment lie. We might say, then, that although primary diagnosis is a key strategy for addressing the population’s health, hospitals and clinics have invested more in high-tech, high-cost, precision apparatus. The growth of ventilators and patient monitoring is linked directly to needs resulting from COVID.

Preventive diagnosis has been shown to help better work with pathologies requiring lengthy treatments, thereby minimizing emergency procedures. This helps focus efforts in situations of crisis, as the chronic side of the illness is relatively controlled. In parallel, the strategy looks to primary care. We know that the initial moments of care are vital to preventing further complications. This is why it is indispensable to have a robust system for this kind of treatment, as it prevents preexisting illnesses from worsening. Above all, it helps reduce costs and make the system more efficient. And in this respect, the pandemic has taught us an important lesson and has left us with a tremendous opportunity to develop telehealth (TH) as a primary-care tool with enormous reach. GHI has produced extremely interesting data about the adoption of this system in second- and third-level centers. At the end of 2021, 15% of hospitals in the region had TH programs; 9% were “hubs” (hospitals where the experts are), while 6% were “spokes” (where the patients are), and just 1% offer international TH.  As you can see, the opportunity is still considerably large.

To conclude, we might say that the biggest lessons in this respect have been the need to:

• Fortify primary health care through by shoring up care strategies like telehealth, reaching more people, more quickly and efficiently.
  
• Equip hospitals and clinics with beds for different types of care (intensive, intermediate, and outpatient care) by establishing priorities in care based on pathologies and staging.
  
• Enhance care centers with equipment that facilitates quick and precise diagnosis, working almost exclusively with specialist-equipment diagnosis and/or treatment.
  
• Plan strategies for purchasing, equipment procurement, and investment in technology, to take advantage of opportunities that the pandemic has opened up, and advances in virtual care.

LESSON 2: Approaching the Crisis as a Moment of Opportunity

The crisis generated as a consequence of the Pandemic has brought opportunities for companies whose products were listed as first-necessity, or those that were able to launch onto the market products needed to combat the Pandemic. The most emblematic example of this is the PCR test in its various models: rapid test, self-test, and laboratory test being the among the most widely known.

However, in most cases the medical-device industry has seen a considerable drop in sales of its products and services, due to the low demand for so-called elective procedures, and it has led them to rethink a large part of their business. In this respect, the rupture has occurred not only in the ways of doing business—both in the strategy and in the sales of each market—but above all in pricing.

To remain competitive, many companies have reconsidered their pricing strategy based on direct sales, which has posed a challenge to the role of distributors—somewhat of an adjustment variable for most businesses finding themselves in an economic crunch. Distributors are key, and they play a very important role for companies that need to develop a market, or launch a product in many places at the same time, especially when the company has no local presence in markets spanning large expanses of territory. But they are also the adjustment variable in a crisis. This is nothing new, and it is often the case that the relationship with them is like a pendulum.

During the Pandemic, companies have focused on their larger clients, dropping business that takes considerable effort to develop. This has led to a better knowledge of the needs of important clients, and to improved revenues in the midst of the crisis. The key lies in understanding that critical moments drive us to create changes. In this case, there will be better opportunities for those who achieve the best balance to maintain strong relationships with direct clients, that are sustainable over time, and grow with minimal in-house efforts by working collaboratively with distributors who are aligned with the ways in which each company works.

But the question is, have we taken full advantage of the opportunities that have arisen? Have we been able to transform our businesses by leveraging the technological advances that have come about through the digitalization the world has experienced, particularly between March and October of 2020? Our next article on Lessons Learned from the Pandemic will include a look inside this topic.

At GHI, we always approach subjects from a constructive angle in an attempt to generate productive debate. Find out more about our solutions here.

You can also contact us directly if you are interested in exploring the possibility of a personalized market study to help your business understand the market better, whether this is on a general level or in a key segment of a specific country.

Market intelligence – which allows you to understand acquisition trends, penetration levels and the how Latin America’s healthcare system compares with the world – could make the difference between a 2021 that gains back the ground lost in 2020… or falls short.

To help sales and marketing teams focused on Latin America, here are 10 key stats:

101%
Growth rate for positron emission tomography in Mexican hospitals, 2016-2019

7%
penetration rate of angiography systems in Argentina’s 2000+ hospitals

1,487
Total amount of hospitals in Brazil with 90+ beds

15.8%
growth in fluoroscopy systems in Central American hospitals in 2019

39.8%
The growth in linear accelerators in Colombian hospitals in 2019

47%
growth in gamma cameras in Chilean hospitals, 2016-2019

13
equipment categories grew in Colombian hospitals in 2019, with linear accelerators, MRI machines and mammography systems growing the most

-16.1%
The drop in linear accelerators in Mexican hospitals in 2019, while 15 other categories (from anesthesia machines to positron emission tomography) grew from 0.5% to 20%

9.6% to 45.5%
In Peru, the range of expansion of the top 6 medical equipment types that grew the most in 2019

63%
penetration for telemedicine in Chilean hospitals

Get Deeper Data

Go beyond these 10 figures to obtain 1,490 more key data points by ordering Medical Equipment Market Report Latin America 2020.

This comprehensive report identifies:

• The top 70 hospitals in Latin America in high-technology equipment adoption
• Overall penetration of basic equipment and specialized equipment in all Latin American hospitals
• Penetration of base installed equipment in 7 key Latin American hospital markets
• Total amounts of 19 crucial types of hospital equipment (ventilators, robotic surgery systems, hemodialysis machines, C-arms, patient monitors and more) in all of Latin America
• Average amounts of major hospital equipment types
• Importation growth and contraction trends, 2016-2019
• Healthcare technology penetration levels for top markets

And much more. Click here to view a report sample and table of contents.

As 2020 winds down, make the most of your budget by investing in market intelligence that could help ensure your success in 2021.

It comes down to numbers: Latin America has more than 20,000 hospitals, compared to 5,754 for the United States, for example. By itself, Brazil is #4 in the world in terms of amount of hospitals, with 7,878, behind Japan (8,565), India (8,652) and China (23,170).

In fact, Brazil and Mexico are both in the top 10 of countries with the most hospitals: the amount of hospitals in Mexico is 3,658, more than Germany or France and more than 5 times the amount of hospitals in Canada (725).

Beyond Brazil and Mexico, other key hospital markets in Latin America are Colombia (with 2,554 hospitals), Argentina (2,306 hospitals) and Chile (383 hospitals). While Chile’s amount of hospitals may seem relatively small, keep in mind that it has more hospitals than Switzerland (298), the Netherlands (259) and Belgium (191), among other markets.

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Growth Prospects

Of course, the greater opportunity for global medical equipment or device brands is not just in the sheer number of hospitals: it’s about the rapidly growing demand that Latin American hospitals have for this equipment.

In tracking this growth with the HospiScope database, we’ve seen hospitals in Latin America significantly grow their equipment counts in 2017. For example:

• Mexican hospitals increased nuclear medicine systems by more than 50%, MRI machines by 24% and gamma cameras by 17%
• Brazilian hospitals increased their EKG machine counts by 34%, their MRI machines by 9% and their CAT scanners by 7%
• Argentine hospitals increased their counts MRI machines, EKG machines, endoscopy towers, ventilators and EEG machines by more than 50%
• Chilean hospitals increased their stereotactic mammography machine counts by 34% in 2017, while also increasing their counts of MRI machines (20%), ultrasound machines (14%), CAT scanners (10%) and EKG machines (3%)
• Colombian hospitals increased their counts of ultrasound machines by 44% in 2017, while also elevating their counts of X-ray machines (42%), EKG machines (40%), MRI machines (37%) and EEG machines (25%)

And that’s just the bigger markets. HospiScope also tracked strong 2017 growth in equipment counts for hospitals in Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Guatemala and other smaller markets.

The figures from HospiScope jibe well with a different set of numbers for 2017: the amounts of different equipment types imported into Latin American countries. We’ve already noted significant growth in Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina, among other markets.

Solidify Your Share

Given the current health trends (the rise in NCDs) and demographic shifts (the projected explosion in seniors) in Latin America, it seems likely that the region’s 20,000+ hospitals will become bigger battlegrounds as established players jockey for position while also fending off companies from Asia that are starting to explore the LatAm market. And since market intelligence can often give you the edge over competitors, you may want to explore using ShareScope for a data-driven third-party evaluation of your market share in different countries, as well as In-Scope to obtain intelligence on competitors or more detailed market studies.

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The Asian Hospital Market

You may have noticed the huge numbers for Asian hospital markets — like China — that we cited at the beginning of the piece. So have any number of medical equipment manufacturers, but Asian countries present their own challenges for market entry. That’s why here at Global Health Intelligence we have been working to offer market intelligence for the Asian healthcare market, which you can find here. Beyond those preliminaries, our experienced team can also help you with ad-hoc custom research for the Asian hospital market.

Contact us directly to explore more.

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.