Hospitalar 2012 Draws Device Firms to Brazil First came the Geeks. Then came the Scrubs

In mid-May, Brazil’s most populous city became the consummate host, welcoming a tiny tour of tech junkies just days before it was invaded by throngs of healthcare professionals.

Roughly 90,000 doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, buyers and medical device manufacturers converged on São Paulo May 22-25 to participate in Hospitalar 2012, an international conference and fair for healthcare practitioners.

Billed as the largest medical trade show in Latin America (and ranking among the world’s top three), the four-day event drew worldwide attention—enticing participants from neighboring countries like Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Venezuela as well as those from such far-away lands as Russia, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. In total, visitors from 68 countries roamed the cavernous halls of Expo Center Norte to see the latest incarnations of hospital and laboratory equipment, ventilation, infant incubation, home healthcare products, emergency transportation, and nebulizers.

“Hospitalar promotes and fosters business and networking between the supplying industry and hospital and clinic directors, and the healthcare professionals,” Hospitalar founder and President Waleska Santos, M.D., said. “It is the big yearly meeting point of the hospital sector in the Americas.”

This year’s big meeting point featured the addition of a digital health seminar that explored various opportunities in the burgeoning healthcare IT/telemedicine industry, a sector growing by 11 percent per year, according to some estimates. The seminar—officially dubbed the “1st International Fair and Forum of Telemedicine, Telehealth and Information Technology for Healthcare”—was held simultaneously with Hospitalar and focused on ways mobile phones and computers can both track and monitor patients’ health. One session, for example, explained the basics of creating a digital support network for hospital patients immediately after they are discharged.

“The objective is to share information about the opportunities for entrepreneurship, besides boosting up the private areas to perceive the modern and interactive resources of telemedicine and telehealth as integrative tools of actions already performed by hospitals and home care companies,” Hospitalar Digital Health honorary President Chao Lung Wen said. Wen is head of the Discipline of Telemedicine in the School of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and he also is president of the Brazilian Council of Telemedicine and Telehealth.

Nearly six dozen companies touted healthcare IT solutions at the Telemedicine Fair and Forum, including multinational conglomerates like Philips and GE Healthcare, and smaller firms such as Medsystem SV, Wheb Informática Ltda. and TOTVS S.A.