Fraudulent healthcare insurance rates in Emerging Markets can reach 50%. That makes private and statutory insurance schemes hard to run. But new biometric systems can dramatically cut corruption.
Dal Ben, which claims to be Brazil’s largest homecare company, aims to diversify its client base through partnerships with Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs), as well as expanding into nursing homes and acute hospitals. We speak to Marcelo Fonseca, board member of Dal Ben, about the future of homecare in Brazil.
Leading international supplier of healthcare gases and services, Air Liquide has recently expanded its hygiene division to the Asia-Pacific region. We speak to Pascal Vinet, director of global operations for healthcare, about the group’s strategy.
The Brazilian healthcare market continues to open up with the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, GIC, buying a stake in the hospital group, Rede D’Or. Valor Economico, a local newspaper, says it has taken a 15.3% stake, with the bank BTG and the founding Moll family selling equal parts. A price of $1.01bn (3.2bn reals) values the company at $6.6bn.
Across the world, people are living longer. But many emerging economies face a horrible question that is not posed in Europe: will too large a section of the population be old before the country is rich enough to provide for them? Here we look at the very different ways that elderly care is developing in China, India, the UAE and Brazil.
Healthcare Nova can reveal that mobile phone giant Telefónica is rolling out its mobile health services to all its Latin American countries over the next two months. Launched in Brazil in 2012 it now has 2m customers there. It is also about to turn Saluspot, a platform to message doctors and book appointments, into a subscription service. Mobile health services include 24/7 call centres and SMS health tips and advice.
The global deficit of healthcare professionals is getting worse. The World Health Organisation estimates the shortage at 7m today rising to 13m by 2035 – or 18m if you include medical technicians. Not to mention the deficits in management staff. Operators need increasingly innovative ways to respond to the HR crisis, driving a paradigm shift in the landscape of medical training, recruitment and operation.
Persuading public sector hospitals to outsource the management of surgery sounds unlikely to lead to business success. After all, surgeons are powerful and surgery is a jealously guarded core competency. You might imagine that few public sector hospitals would willingly outsource. Yet Vitalmex has grown sales to $300m with this very business model and is now active in Peru, Colombia and Brazil. Thailand and Turkey could be next.
A new report by reinsurer SwissRe lauds the potential of private health insurance (PHI) to transform healthcare in Emerging Markets. Medical insurance premiums are expected to grow at 10% per annum between 2013-2020, double the pace of emerging market GDP growth and triple global health insurance growth. We spoke to the author Clarence Wong, chief economist for Asia at SwissRe.
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