Read the Conversation
Conversation highlights:
- Argentina’s pharmaceutical system relies on a highly complex, real-time validation and payment infrastructure, where actors like Farmalink play a central role in connecting pharmacies, insurers, and manufacturers through immediate eligibility checks and nationwide transaction processing.
- With nearly two-thirds of the population covered by private insurance and discounts applied directly at the pharmacy, Argentina operates a uniquely hybrid funding model that requires multilayered verification, still combining paper prescriptions, digital prescriptions, online validation of health insurance rules, and physical audits of dispensing documentation.
- Farmalink is advancing a shift toward fully digital tracking of dispensing of medicines, piloting paperless workflows with the major institutional payers in the country, though adoption may remain uneven due to regulatory fragmentation and cultural resistance across the ecosystem.
- Significant investment in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and intelligent auditing reflects the growing need to manage sensitive health data at scale, while ensuring 24/7 system reliability across a geographically and operationally complex country.
- Healthcare technology in Argentina offers a rare combination of purpose and complexity, attracting talent motivated by real patient impact while requiring continuous learning to navigate regulatory, operational, and system-wide challenges.
EF: Farmalink occupies a distinctive position in Argentina’s healthcare ecosystem — managed by pharmaceutical market experts, it's aimed to serve the entire commercial chain. How does that structure shape what the company does and how it operates?
JMSM: Farmalink sits at the centre of a reimbursement and medicines dispensing validation system that most people in the chain never see but depend on entirely. Our Board of Directors is composed of experts from across the pharmaceutical industry, bringing together perspectives that span the full spectrum of the industry -from local laboratories to global pharmaceutical companies. These different perspectives reflecting diverse commercial cultures and market dynamics are aligned under a shared purpose: ensuring the system operates effectively and safeguarding access to medicines in pharmacies across the country.
Argentina’s model is unusual in the region. Although a universal right to health access is reflected in our Constitution, almost two-thirds of the population has additional health insurances that bring wider access to medicines through discounts over list prices agreed between laboratories and HMOs— Obras Sociales or Empresas de Medicina Prepaga —. In other Latin American countries, the public sector represents 70 to 90% of the market, taking the SUS in Brazil as an example. Yet, in Argentina, the private-dominant structure creates a complex web of stakeholders: wholesalers, pharmacies, HMOs, and laboratories, all of whom need to settle accounts with each other accurately and efficiently. Our role is to sit in the middle of that web, validating prescriptions, verifying identities, running rules of authorization, approving consumption, auditing scripts, and ensuring reimbursements and payments flow correctly, for drugs acquired in more than 12.000 pharmacies of the country, by patients with different health care insurances. It requires robust technology as well as deep institutional knowledge to keep access to medicines running as well as it has to date, which is why our team carries more than 20 years of experience with the details of this ecosystem.
EF: Can you walk us through how this reimbursement and validation system actually works?
JMSM: We work within the environment of private agreements between HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry. Our processes begin when a physician issues an electronic prescription to a patient enrolled in a health plan. The patient takes it to a pharmacy, which connects electronically to our system in real time. Within 2 seconds, we verify in real time the prescription features, the patient’s identity, the prescribing physician, and the product, then apply the relevant business rules to determine whether this specific person can receive this product from this doctor at this pharmacy — and what discount applies due to the HMO's health insurance plan the patient has. The pharmacy receives immediate authorization, with discounts ranging from 40% to 100% for the patient.
At month’s end, pharmacies submit proof of each transaction: the prescription, the fiscal ticket, and the Troquel — a coded section of the medicine’s packaging that must accompany every receipt. This is where something worth noting happens: despite the digital infrastructure around it, a team of nearly 400 people physically verifies that every prescription dispensing meets the requirements needed to be valid (e.g., that every Troquel matches every ticket and prescription, that the physician’s signature is included, among other features) — 100% of the volume, no sampling. Once that audit is complete, we handle the full liquidation cycle, informing more than 12,000 pharmacies, over 200 laboratories, nearly 30 wholesalers, and 60+ HMOs’ health plans of their exact reimbursement rights for the month. The obligations between laboratories and pharmacies are settled through product compensation notes, generally through wholesalers; HMOs reimburse pharmacies in cash.
EF: There’s an interesting contrast between the digitalization of electronic prescriptions and the manual checking of Troquels. Where do you see the system moving in the next five years?
JMSM: The current administration is pushing hard on digitalization, with electronic prescriptions now mandatory at the federal level. Implementation is uneven; Argentina’s provinces retain decision-making authority over health, education, and security, and not all have adopted the measure yet. Buenos Aires province, for instance, has not yet adhered to the electronic prescription legislation. Even so, the private sector, most of the public sector, the Federal Ministry of Health, and PAMI — the country’s largest HMO — are all moving in the same direction.
We are currently running pilots to eliminate the last paper-based steps. The model has four components: electronic prescriptions at the point of care; tokenization for pharmacy-level validation; online dispensing rules checking for specific patients, type of product, and HMO; and certification of medicine purchase billing with ARCA, the national tax agency, to confirm that invoices genuinely exist. With those four digital layers in place, there is no remaining reason to handle paper.
The biggest challenge is not technology — it is culture. Pharmacies need to work some processes differently. HMOs need to accept that digital traces are as legally valid as physical documents. And judges need to be comfortable ruling eventually on cases backed by electronic records rather than paper files. That shift takes time, but it is happening.
EF: How will this digital transformation change your auditing and fraud prevention capabilities?
JMSM: It opens up a completely different kind of audit. Right now, much of what we do is verifying that physical documents are in order; checking papers and formal signatures after the fact. With full digitalization, we can move to intelligent, real-time analysis: crossing prescription data across different HMOs at the same pharmacy, mapping where patients were prescribed medicines versus where they actually collected them, and flagging anomalies before they become problems.
Our roadmap here is grounded in AI and data science applied to consumption patterns. The financial sector has been doing this for years — using behavioral data to detect fraud and misuse before transactions complete — and we are deliberately learning from those methodologies. We are already starting to apply them. The fundamental shift is from auditing what happened to preventing what should not happen. That changes the value of what we do for every stakeholder in the chain.
EF: Building data centers and expanding technology infrastructure requires significant investment. Why should investors focus on Argentina’s healthcare technology sector?
JMSM: Argentina is a genuinely complex healthcare environment, and complexity creates real demand for technology that can manage interoperability between dozens of provinces, subsystems, and stakeholder types. That demand is structural; it does not go away with economic cycles. Healthcare information is also inherently sensitive, which means the bar for infrastructure, security, and reliability is permanently high. That combination — sustained demand, high standards, and barriers to entry — is what makes the sector attractive.
At Farmalink, we started moving to the cloud four years ago and now run on Oracle Cloud, with on-premise redundancies maintained in Argentina for resilience. The reason is straightforward: every patient in the country must be able to validate their prescription at any pharmacy at any hour — whether it is midnight in Ushuaia or midday in Buenos Aires. That requirement for continuous, nationwide availability sets the standard for everything we build. Investors who understand that this is not a discretionary service, but a critical piece of national health infrastructure, will see why the technology investment case here is durable.
EF: What achievement are you most proud of in your two years at Farmalink, and what’s still on your agenda?
JMSM: What I am most proud of is the culture we have built, or more accurately, the culture I found and helped strengthen. This is a team that has been running the same core processes for more than 25 years and is genuinely open to questioning them. That is not common. When I arrived, I found people who were curious, willing to debate, and ready to update how they worked if the argument was good. That openness is the foundation for everything else we are trying to do.
In practical terms, the progress on digitalization and the pilot program to eliminate paper have been the clearest milestones. But the more meaningful achievement is that innovation is now expected here, not exceptional.
What remains on the agenda is building the next generation. We need people who combine fluency in new technologies with a genuine willingness to learn the pharmaceutical market from the inside — because this ecosystem has layers that take time to understand. Attracting and retaining that kind of talent is the work I am most focused on now.
EF: What advice would you give to young professionals considering a career in healthcare?
JMSM: Start with the purpose. At the end of every process we run — every prescription validated, every payment settled — there is a person whose health depends on the system working correctly. That is not a metaphor. It is what makes this field genuinely different from most others, and it is worth leading with when you think about why you want to be here.
Beyond purpose, healthcare rewards curiosity more than most sectors. The system is complex, it changes slowly, and that combination can either make you complacent or drive you to find improvements that others have stopped looking for. The professionals who thrive here tend to be the ones who see stability as an invitation to go deeper rather than a reason to stop pushing. Small improvements — making it easier for a patient to collect a prescription, reducing friction at the pharmacy counter — compound over time into real impact. That is a career worth building.
