The state of healthcare in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) faces numerous challenges. This region sees technology and innovation as a primary solution for the lack of access to quality healthcare in a region of 650 million people.
The key issues are accessibility, high out-of-pocket costs, and healthcare disparities. Medical app development services can offer practical solutions such as telehealth and e-prescriptions to improve accessibility and bring the costs down. In addition, longer-term strategic technological development can further improve access to healthcare in the region.
However, the report of the Inter-American Development Bank indicates the tech skills shortage in LAC. To further explain the underperformance of current solutions, which are mainly driven by USA-based professionals, the report indicates:
“Providing digital health isn’t like streaming Netflix. Tortillas in Mexico aren’t like tortillas in the US: you can’t just build Chipotle”.
Given that, partnering with professional healthcare development teams in offshore countries with strong tech talent and lean MVP low-cost development will be a viable path to solving healthcare challenges through technology and innovation in LAC.
What is Healthtech?
Healthtech, as prioritized by investors for Latin America, encompasses all traditional digital healthcare solutions, such as:
- Electronic patient records (EHR);
- telehealth;
- E-prescriptions.
These three solutions are fundamental to the region and are a part of standardized medical app development services. The whole healthcare tech targeted by the region is, of course, wider as shown in the image below.
The business landscape includes more than 1200 startups in healthtech and with funds flowing mostly led by technical co-operation agreements. Below is shown the distribution of investment by areas, categorized by funding instrument and broken down by number of projects and their amounts. In addition to this $37.4m, there has also been $84 million of indirect investment through 21 VCs.
Graph Health Innovation Project Portfolio by Region and Financial Instrument
Challenges and Risks in the Latin American Healthtech Market
As identified by the Inter-American Development Bank report, the biggest challenges are:
- For EHR records, interoperability between the public and private medical institutions while maintaining the comprehensiveness of the records.
- Integration of telehealth with e-prescriptions.
In order for digital health to become widely adopted, it must be universally used without borders in the region. Healthcare personnel must be able to maintain a comprehensive approach while having minimal pressure for digital skills.
In addition, cultural differences are strong and require a unique approach that fits the distinct environment of each Latin culture. Moreover, the report also reveals the underemphasized role of women in healthcare while they are the major force behind it in LAC.
To address these, a healthcare mobile app development company should make distinct changes:
- During the discovery stage, healthcare app development must focus on conducting interviews with local healthcare professionals to gather requirements, pain points, and assess their digital literacy levels.
- Instead of traditional competitor analysis, healthcare application development should go over the interoperability opportunities and determine areas where your digital healthcare solution can be most flexible.
- Healthcare in the US is time-restricted and transactional, while in Latin America, health professionals take a much more contextual and holistic approach. Waiting time is usually an issue, but doctor visits take longer due to their relationship-focused nature and emphasis on understanding the context. For this reason, custom healthcare app development might prioritize dynamic rescheduling and wait time management as a point of advantage.
The biggest risk when going into healthtech in Latin America is the nascent stage of infrastructure development. Not only is it fragmented, but it is also mostly skewed towards Brazil and Mexico. Local distinctions also make scaling into neighboring regions limited or even impossible, depending on a startup.
As such, a healthcare app development company should be quite careful in balancing costs and prioritizing profitability from the start. Scaling might be a long shot, but its achievement is almost a guarantee with how things are developing.
Future Outlook and Trends in Healthtech
The initial task of the medical app development trend in LAC is to improve accessibility, adoption, and overcome the digital literacy barrier. This can be done by digitalizing access to medicine through EHR, telehealth, and e-prescriptions.
Once this foundation is set, a whole new spectrum of healthcare app development services will take hold. The strategic outlook with trend shifts is shown below. While the report mentions a range of trends, certain ones are likely to be a priority and develop first.
For instance, the Latin America region has the second-highest obesity rate globally, with 24.2% of the adult population classified as obese. This is also connected to child obesity which is now accounted with 7.3 million children under the age of 5 being overweight or obese.
That being said, custom healthcare app development can develop solutions that will tackle the issue as well as prevent it for the other part of the population. This might involve a combination of nutrition and fitness apps supplemented with affordable wearables.
These areas present a current opportunity with the performance of top apps in this sector in a steady decline. The current top performers are all apps developed for the US, Canadian, and European consumer, which is likely to explain their shortfall in the Latin American market.
- MyFitnessPal lost 6K in downloads and 112K active users in a 2-month period of 2024.
- YAZIO Calorie Counter & Diet lost 88% in downloads in a quarter.
- Kompanion Intermittent Fasting performed even worse with losing 93% in downloads.
- Other apps such as Nutrition Technologies and BodyFast: Intermittent Fasting, also showed downward trends.
There is still yet an app to appear that will work with and not against Latino staples when it comes to eating. Fitness apps coming from individualistic cultures are bound to fail in a community-centered Latin setting. Sustaining motivation to use these apps lies in a completely different approach. Therefore, future trends are centered around developing digital solutions rooted in Latin culture.