Parcerias de negócio como estratégia de crescimento

·26 min·2 clips

Rodolfo Chung explains how doctors, pharmacies, and labs operate in complete isolation within Brazil's fragmented healthcare system.

1. Corporate World with Milton Jung is a CBN business podcast; this episode focuses on strategic partnerships and the Memed digital prescription platform. 2. The guest is Rodolfo Chung, CEO of Memed, a Brazilian digital medical prescription startup founded by dermatologists from Avaré that invented the category in Brazil 15 years ago. 3. The central thesis of the conversation is that value creation and monetization do not need to target the same actor in a multi-sided platform, and that identifying who has both a pain point and resources is more important than charging the end user. 4. Chung describes Brazilian healthcare as uniquely fragmented: doctors do not know pharmacy stock levels or drug prices, pharmacies do not know patients' health plan coverage, and health plans do not communicate with medical schools or Anvisa. 5. Memed occupies a structurally privileged position because a digital prescription necessarily touches every actor — doctor, patient, pharmacy, laboratory, hospital, pharmaceutical company, health plan, and regulator. 6. The platform has 150,000 active monthly physician users in Brazil and operates free of charge for doctors, patients, and pharmacies; the pharmaceutical industry pays for digital communication access to the physician base. 7. Brazil has more than 500,000 doctors and only 15% of prescriptions are currently digital; Chung estimates the rate is growing at 35% annually and predicts paper prescriptions will be eliminated within three to four years. 8. Before Memed, Chung spent 21 years at Ambev, the beverage multinational, operating in multiple countries before becoming CEO of Zé Delivery, the beer delivery unicorn. 9. At Zé Delivery, the counterintuitive model was to charge zero to neighborhood bars and delivery workers while having beverage manufacturers — Ambev, distilleries — pay the platform because they had both pain points and margin. 10. Chung explicitly frames the Zé Delivery model as the template for Memed: 'For whom you create value is not necessarily with whom you should monetize.' 11. The pharmaceutical industry in Brazil is prohibited from advertising directly to patients; it can only communicate with doctors, making Memed's physician access channel uniquely valuable to drug companies. 12. Memed measures pharmaceutical industry return on investment similarly to any media channel — tracking brand recall among physicians and whether clinical information was absorbed — and reports US digital communication with doctors is already at 25%, versus under 1% in Brazil. 13. Chung cites Peter Thiel's principle from Zero to One: changing someone's habit requires a solution ten times better than the status quo, not merely better, and uses this to explain why Memed is still improving the product rather than declaring victory. 14. Anvisa finalized regulations in April 2026 allowing controlled substances — previously restricted to paper blue-yellow prescription forms — to be prescribed digitally, which Chung calls a major milestone that will boost digital adoption. 15. Digital prescriptions also solve a practical problem: patients who can only afford part of a multi-month prescription can use the digital record to refill the remaining boxes later without returning to the doctor, which is impossible with a paper prescription. 16. Chung argues that AI will be transformational in healthcare, particularly for reducing bureaucracy and supporting generalist physicians who cannot specialize across all fields; he frames AI as a 'superpower for the doctor,' not a replacement. 17. On partnership strategy generally, Chung advises businesses to focus on what they do well and seek partners for everything else, describing this as a 'horizontal' model versus verticalization. 18. He notes that many partnerships with hospitals, health plans, and Anvisa involve no monetary exchange — the value is mutual integration, efficiency, and advocacy for digital adoption. 19. The interview tone is structured and analytical; Jung asks sequential questions about the business model and Chung gives detailed, methodical answers with concrete examples. 20. Business leaders, startup founders, and healthcare professionals interested in platform economics and Brazilian health tech will find the episode most relevant.

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