“Unlike traditional providers, we’re redefining how insurers and providers collaborate, creating a genuine win-win scenario: lower costs for payers, better experiences for patients, and more flexible, rewarding work for healthcare professionals.”
Interview with Fernando Pares, Founder and CEO of ISA Saúde, São Paulo, Brazil
The future of healthcare lies not in hospitals, but in people’s homes, said Fernando Pares, Founder and CEO of ISA Saúde, a fast-growing health-tech company redefining at-home care. Transforming healthcare in Brazil requires rethinking long-standing inefficiencies, aligning incentives between insurers and providers, and harnessing technology to bring care closer to patients. In an interview with IFC, Pares discusses how the company is reshaping insurer–provider dynamics, ensuring quality and trust in decentralized care, and using data and artificial intelligence to make Brazil’s healthcare system more efficient, equitable, and humane.
Health insurers are key partners for you. How do you expect the dynamic between insurers and providers to evolve in Brazil, and how is ISA Saúde positioned in that context?
In Brazil, the relationship between insurers and providers has traditionally been quite difficult. Most of the market still operates on a fee-for-service model, which creates misaligned incentives. Providers focus on volume, while insurers struggle with rising claims and shrinking margins. It’s a system that drives costs up without necessarily improving outcomes.
At ISA Saúde, we’re changing that dynamic by bringing care home. Our model decentralizes healthcare, allowing patients, especially elderly ones, to receive hospital-level care in the comfort of their homes. This not only improves clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction but also cuts insurer costs by up to 70 percent in certain treatments, with an average reduction of around 45 percent.
Unlike traditional providers, we’re redefining how insurers and providers collaborate, creating a genuine win-win scenario: lower costs for payers, better experiences for patients, and more flexible, rewarding work for healthcare professionals. With technology and data at the core, we’re helping to reshape Brazil’s healthcare ecosystem into one that’s more efficient, humane, and sustainable.
How does bringing healthcare services into people’s homes shift the patient–provider relationship, and how do you ensure trust and quality in that environment?
Bringing healthcare into someone’s home changes everything. When our teams walk through a patient’s door, they’re guests first and clinicians second, so empathy, respect, and adaptability are key. Every professional goes through a rigorous 38-day onboarding that includes technical, operational, and behavioral training. Once in the field, their work is continuously monitored through our digital platform, which tracks every step of care—from medication management to protocol adherence.
We like to think of ISA as a hospital with 700 beds spread across Brazil. Technology is what connects it all, allowing our clinical and quality teams to supervise care in real time. And because healthcare is ultimately built on trust, we’re obsessive about transparency and fast problem-solving. That’s what keeps patients confident and our standards consistently high. Quality and trust are non-negotiable.
ISA Saúde relies on a decentralized network of healthcare professionals. What benefits and challenges have you faced with this model, especially regarding quality control and training?
Our decentralized model gives healthcare professionals flexibility and patients access to care wherever they are, but it only works if quality stays consistently high. That’s why we’ve built what we call ISA University, a continuous education program where every professional follows a rigorous learning path depending on the procedures they perform.
Once in the field, quality control is constant. Every visit is tracked in our system; patients rate their experience through the app—much like an Uber review—and outcomes are monitored in real time. Professionals who consistently perform well earn higher pay, while those who fall short are retrained or paused.
The biggest challenge is maintaining this standard as we scale. We’ve grown from 150 to over 1,500 daily patients in just two years, and we’ll only keep expanding if we can do it without compromising quality. Sometimes that means saying “no” to new patients until the right professionals are ready.
The upside is enormous: professionals have more autonomy and less administrative burden, patients receive faster, more personalized care, and insurers gain full transparency. It’s a model built on empowerment—but guarded by data and discipline.
What traditional inefficiencies in the healthcare system were you aiming to disrupt, and how does your technology-driven model address them in a new way?
Brazil’s healthcare system still runs largely on paper and that creates huge inefficiencies. Information from home-care visits can take up to 60 days to reach insurers or physicians, which means delayed decisions, missed insights, and zero visibility into what’s really happening with patients. On top of that, there’s widespread waste and fraud, because no one can track how resources are actually being used.
ISA was built to change that. Our platform digitalizes the entire patient journey from the moment a nurse leaves for a visit to the final clinical report, so everything is visible in real time. We can monitor vitals, track supplies, and share data instantly with doctors and insurers. That transparency eliminates waste and fraud, while our AI models help flag early signs of deterioration to prevent complications.
At the end of the day, we’re tackling two of healthcare’s biggest blind spots: waste and lack of data. By turning a paper-based system into a connected, data-driven one, we make care faster, safer, and dramatically more efficient for everyone involved.
Can you share a success story that demonstrates the impact of your at-home services on patient outcomes or healthcare equity?
One of Brazil’s top five private insurers recently centralized 90 percent of its at-home care with ISA, and the results have been remarkable. In just 12 months, they saw a 42 percent reduction in total healthcare costs, hospital readmission rates dropped from 11 percent to under 2 percent, and the equivalent of 3,000 hospital bed-days freed up. That means patients recovered faster, insurers spent less, and hospitals could focus on more critical cases.
Behind those numbers is real-time data. Our technology continuously monitors patients’ clinical and operational data, flagging early signs of deterioration. In one case, we prevented a severe infection in a 72-year-old patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by detecting subtle changes in his vitals. Our system alerted the care team, antibiotics were started immediately, and hospitalization was avoided altogether.
These stories capture what ISA is about: better outcomes, lower costs, and more equitable access, especially for patients who would otherwise struggle to reach quality care.
How do you see technology continuing to shape how ISA delivers homecare in the future? Will that future include AI?
Absolutely. Technology is already central to how we operate, but AI will take it to the next level. Right now, we use AI to flag early signs that a patient’s condition might be deteriorating, allowing our team to intervene before a small issue becomes a crisis. The next step is predictive care—using the vast amount of real-world data we’re collecting to understand which treatments work best for specific patient profiles.
Because we monitor thousands of patients daily across Brazil, we’re building a uniquely rich dataset—not just medical information, but also social and environmental factors, like living conditions and family support. Over time, that will allow us to predict not only who is likely to fall ill or be readmitted, but also which care plans and medications deliver the best outcomes for everyone.
In short, we see AI as a way to move from reactive to proactive care—anticipating needs, personalizing treatment, and making home healthcare smarter, safer, and more equitable for everyone.
Looking ahead, how do you see ISA Saúde evolving? Will you expand into other areas of home care or work more closely with Brazil’s public health system?
Both. Brazil faces a massive shortage of hospital beds—roughly half the number per capita that the World Health Organization recommends and it’s simply not feasible to build enough new hospitals to close that gap. The government has already launched a “Better at Home” initiative to bring healthcare into people’s homes but scaling it requires private partners. That’s where we see a huge opportunity to make a real social impact, especially for lower-income populations who often have the least access to quality care.
We’re in active discussions about how to support these public-private partnerships, bringing our technology, logistics, and workforce network to help the government reach more patients, faster. We’ve even treated patients near the Amazon, where care sometimes involves delivering supplies by boat—so we know how transformative home-based care can be in remote regions.
At the same time, we’re expanding the range of treatments we can safely deliver at home. Next year, we’ll launch services like oncology infusions and dialysis, areas where patients often endure long hospital stays that could be avoided.
Our goal is simple but ambitious: to make “home” the best hospital in Brazil. If it can be done safely and effectively outside of a hospital, we’ll find a way to do it—powered by data, technology, and empathy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Published in November 2025.
Fernando Pares is the founder and CEO of ISA Saúde, Brazil’s leading home healthcare healthtech. An economist trained at Insper and an Endeavor entrepreneur, he is leading the transformation of healthcare in the country by bringing the hospital into the home—combining clinical excellence, technology, and large-scale impact.