Latin America Rising

Though Latin American has been a bit behind some other nations in the adoption of some of the components of this data revolution, they have made up major ground in recent years. For example, countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile and others now have national EMR systems. Chile boasts a rate of 73 percent adoption of EMRs in its hospitals, while Uruguayan hospitals have a 63% adoption rate for EMRs and more than half of Colombian hospitals (51%) also have added this high-tech records-keeping system.

Telemedicine is also growing business in Latin America. This cutting-edge tool that lets doctors in one facility, sometimes around the world, diagnose and treat patients in another facility has become a $2.5 billion business in Latin America, and the rates continue to grow.

Two other critical components of the healthcare data revolution in Latin America are PACs (picture archiving and communication systems) and RIS (radiology information systems). These two systems can help facilities streamline their electronic imaging technologies and easily share the data between healthcare teams at one facility, or even between different facilities. This is a growing market that has major room for growth in Latin America.

A Big Secret?

Despite this growth, not everyone in the healthcare history knows about these changes in Latin American hospitals. In fact, many believe that there is not much good information available about LatAm hospital facilities.

That was the truth as recently as 2014. But now it isn’t. Global Health Intelligence (GHI) saw that medical device and equipment manufacturers targeting Latin America had 3 problems in terms of healthcare market intelligence: no data, scarce data or unreliable data. That’s why GHI built a hospitals database from scratch—called HospiScope—that now includes hospitals in 14 countries and more than 130 data points each for nearly 90% of the hospitals in Latin America.

Turning Data into Dollars

For medical device and equipment manufacturers in Latin America, this means they no longer have to guess when it comes to strategic planning or targeting the right prospects for sales. Now the LatAm subsidiaries of these global brands can employ the same tactics as the offices in all major world markets: access the market data they need and use that to find prospects. So when it comes to PACS and RIS penetration — which is found in the GHI LatAm hospitals database —, device/equipment manufacturers can see which hospitals have these systems in place. This allows them to identify hospitals investing in technology that could be good targets for their more sophisticated products. In fact, they can even see how many other high-tech products a given hospital or hospitals have so they know even further which hospitals to target with which products. The same applies to telemedicine and EMRs in Latin America, since hospitals with these features are more likely to be interested in more advanced equipment. And of course, the GHI database also offers counts of more basic but necessary equipment in Latin American hospitals (ventilators, MRI machines, meters) so that medical device manufacturers targeting LatAm can find sales prospects with the greatest need of these.

Next Steps

Schedule a free demo of GHI’s database so you can see for yourself how quickly you can identify sales prospects for a wide range of equipment types across markets. We can also help with identifying market share of competitors across specific equipment verticals and custom research for challenging questions, including competitive intelligence.

• 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.