EmpreenderSaúde and Startup Saúde Brasil: Helping Healthcare Entrepreneurs to Change the World

I am a Medical student at the last year of Medicine at Federal University of São Paulo. I always liked management. I started with Peter Drucker and Jack Welch´s books when I was 12. In my second year at university (in Brazil Medicine is a 6-year-course), I got the opportunity to start EPM Júnior, what we call a “junior company”, a not-for-profit business only composed by students which aims at learning healthcare management hands-on. The first time, we failed completely. I started with 13 directors in 2008 and one year later, I was alone, trying to manage a group of 12-15 students.

I am a Medical student at the last year of Medicine at Federal University of São Paulo. I always liked management. I started with Peter Drucker and Jack Welch´s books when I was 12. In my second year at university (in Brazil Medicine is a 6-year-course), I got the opportunity to start EPM Júnior, what we call a “junior company”, a not-for-profit business only composed by students which aims at learning healthcare management hands-on. The first time, we failed completely. I started with 13 directors in 2008 and one year later, I was alone, trying to manage a group of 12-15 students.

Luckily, I then got someone that really knew how to manage people (Marina, a nursing student at that time) and I learned a lot from her. Now we have about 40 people and we are growing a lot, having done consultancy for Angola´s government, Philips Healthcare and SPDM, for example (SPDM is the biggest brazilian healthcare company with R$ 1.7 billion in revenues).

During my time at EPM Júnior, I was invited to tell our story at Feira Hospitalar, the biggest healthcare management congress in America (more than R$ 5 billion in deals in the last event), which gave us a pretty good exposure. I was invited also to be a trainee for São Paulo Anjos, the main brazilian group of business angels at that time, which taught me a lot about investment and different business perspective and introduced me to Cassio Spina, the head of Anjos do Brasil, the biggest brazilian network of angel investors now, which I am a counselor for nowadays. in the meantime I also worked for a R$ 144mi VC, as the responsible for the healthcare deals.

In the mean time, I got to know Dr. Fernando Cembranelli, a friend and partner at EmpreenderSaúde, today the main website for entrepreneurship and innovation written in Portuguese. We have helped many startups and created the seed of an ecossystem for digital health, healthcare entrepreneurs, healthcare investors and so on, with our website (www.empreendersaude.com.br), events and consultancy. Fernando is our walking-brainstorming leader; he is really innovative and full of ideas. Because of EmpreenderSaúde, I met the 3 other people that are our partners now: Antonio, a spanish lawyer that has already sold 2 healthcare companies, got his MBA and is just 27-years old; Lasse, an entrepreneur with an outstanding EMR startup and Istvan, a seasoned and sweet-hearted manager, that worked before as a Director of Marketing and IT for an important health insurance in Brazil.

We are doing now Startup Saúde Brasil, a more scalable way of helping healthcare entrepreneurs. It aims to be the first healthcare incubator in Latin America and it started with a weekend of mentoring and lectures for 10 selected startups, where the main players of the brazilian healthcare sector will be giving their time to these startups.

To know more about us, check it out:http://empreendersaude.com.br/ About Startup Saúde Brasil: http://startupsaudebrasil.com/