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| Freepik |
I leave room to talk about healthtechs because when the ESG theme is discussed, Health is usually not the first to be remembered as a priority area for the implementation of a more sustainable management. It is natural for people to think first of corporations whose activities cause more environmental impacts, such as mining and steel companies, among others. But they forget the consequences of a poorly managed health system and how this is reflected in the lives of each citizen. And that's where the importance of healthtechs lies.
They can be the tool for the health system, which involves both the public and the private sectors, to be more efficient, less expensive and reach more and more people. Sustainability is not limited to the environmental issue. It also involves social and management efficiency initiatives. It's a package. And the technologies that these startups have developed and continue to develop are essential for our healthcare system to finally enter the era of disruption.
Healthtech is a business model with characteristics that are different from the rest of the market, as its products and services are scalable, easy to replicate the idea and innovative differentials even in a scenario of uncertainties. In this way, they bring improvements to the provision of health services, just as fintechs have brought to the financial sector. In short, they are contributing to the humanization of medical care without this implying an increase in costs.
Let's take the public health sector as an example. If a citizen suffers a serious accident, he is immediately taken to a hospital of the Unified Health System (SUS), where he is promptly attended, undergoes tests and, if necessary, even surgery. All for free. And that's good. But if the situation is different, for example, he is at home and starts to feel pain or any other strange symptom, the efficiency is not the same.
The service is time consuming, takes days or months and, when referred for clinical and laboratory tests, ends up entering a waiting list, which can aggravate the diagnosis. The private sector also has its problems, so much so that it has become common for health plans to fail and be absorbed by others; patients complain about the lack of care when they need more complex procedures; and so on. And how to improve all this without increasing costs too much? How to serve well spending little? Certainly, healthtechs have some important answers, contributing solutions to these problems.
