Technology Paves the Way to Integral Health Provision

In Mexico, industry players are trying to become integral health providers to ensure a patient-centric service. The chain for a complete healthcare provision involves many actors. While the most common providers are hospitals, innovation and technology enable many companies to identify areas of improvement and ways to approach each patient more efficiently. To understand how different actors approach this concept, MBN has gathered exclusive opinions from diverse healthcare sectors.

Commercial Director of Grupo Bruluart Juan José Aguirre explained that the provision of integral healthcare has been at the core of the company. However, this concept has evolved as the company understood that care goes beyond reactive procedures. “Instead of being a medicine provider, we are a health provider. Our efforts our focused on seeing medicine as preventive rather than corrective. Through digital platforms and physical magazines, we distribute information and advice patients on living healthy lifestyles.”

Omar Lugo, Country Lead of Biopharmaceutical company UCB, spoke about the company developing a concept called Beyond the Pill, which offers added value to its solutions through digital tools, such as wearables or apps. Lugo Explained than UCB is trying to develop technological tools that can anticipate seizures in people that suffer from epilepsy and warn the patient through their phone or wearables. Technology has an important role in this initiative. That is also the case for retail and e-pharmacy company Farmalisto, which intends to go beyond medicine offering to become a consultancy and prescription provider to ensure an integral service provision through its app. “We want to become the most important and complete healthcare platform in Latin America, to become almost like a hospital at home if the patient needs it to be,” said CEO of Farmalisto José Mora.

Mora highlighted that the company has understood the importance of involving medical professionals in technological developments because of their vision and experience “We have started working with medical professionals to integrate them into the project, while asking for guidelines and feedback because they know best about people’s health.”

In Mexico, private investment and innovation is important, but the public sector is the primary healthcare provider. “About 60 percent of healthcare services are provided by the public sector so budget cuts will have a deep impact. Moreover, demand continues to grow alongside the population. These trends will impact the sector on two fronts: quality and wait times,” says Guillaume Corpart, Managing Director of Global Health Intelligence. Under these circumstances, the sector is looking for strategies to adapt and to continue growing.