Made in Chile: Bitua expands to the Middle East with its services and vending machines
The Chilean healthtech will operate in 26 Middle Eastern countries in 2024 with its smart medical equipment cabinets.
It was in 2021 when Bitua, the startup founded in 2017 by Daniel Ortúzar, received a request to purchase its smart cabinets from a laboratory to control inventory at a hospital, that its founder saw the potential his startup had to provide solutions for the health sector.
Keeping this in mind, today their smart cabinets have become an innovation for the national healthtech sector. Thanks to their development, they are now reaching the Middle East after closing a business deal with Denovo Solutions, a collaboration that will mark a significant milestone in the startup's international expansion.
The founder and CEO of Bitua stated that, "With our arrival in the Middle East, we project that this expansion will generate sales exceeding 2 million dollars in the next three years. This anticipated growth is the result of penetrating markets with high purchasing power and advanced technological infrastructure in the healthcare sector."
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With regard to the agreement, Ortúzar explained that, "Denovo Solutions will be in charge of the distribution and operation of our products in a comprehensive list of countries, covering a very wide and diversified market, such as: Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan".
Alaeddin Ahram, CEO of Denovo Solutions, wanted to emphasize the importance of this alliance for Middle Eastern countries: "Our partnership with Bitua aligns perfectly with our commitment to deliver high-quality healthcare solutions that meet the diverse needs of the regions we serve. Together, we will work to improve health outcomes and generate a lasting impact on public health".
INVENTORY OPTIMIZATION.
Bitua optimizes a health center's inventory, for example, by preventing stock-outs and ensuring medical devices or medications do not expire. They achieved this by using technology and creating a cabinet, the hardware, which stores supplies and a software that provides intelligence for decision making.
Through artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, this system captures information related to the type of products, for example, pacemakers, catheters, and medicated stents, quantity, expiration date, among others. This data is processed by the software, which is capable of calculating the usage curves of these supplies and the replenishment times.
Annually, 163 trillion dollars are lost due to deficiencies in medical inventory control worldwide. In terms of time, staff waste 30% of their work searching for implements that could be devoted to vital patient care.
WHAT IS COMING.
The Middle East is a gigantic leap and becomes the eighth territory encompassing 26 countries. Currently, Bitua operates from Chile and has expanded to Colombia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua.
According to Daniel Ortúzar, they aim to continue expanding their international presence in new markets. "We want to launch a new product this year, we have identified significant needs of our current customers who we want to assist with new solutions".
"Furthermore, for this year we want to strengthen relationships with strategic partners and existing clients, we are entering a stage of strong scaling and we must be prepared for this," concluded the founder of Bitua.