In partnership with the Barco Sorriso Institute, a multidisciplinary team travelled through four riverside communities in the Amazon in May 2026. There were 325 consultations, 26 endoscopic exams and three surgical procedures completed right there, by the riverbank, without any patient having to board a boat to Manaus.

📰 Source: Go Scope – Newsroom
Author: Go Scope Team
Data 31/08/2026

For the families of the riverside communities in Mato Grosso, Alexandre, Socó and Primavera, seeing a specialist doctor through the SUS means, in the conventional flow, a journey of days: boarding a boat towards Manaus, a trip of around 24 hours. There are private clinics closer by, but they are still far away, expensive for the local reality and lack professionals available on a regular basis. In practice, the specialist is an abstraction: someone who exists in the capital, not in the lives of those who live by the river. Delayed diagnosis, in otolaryngology as in any specialty, has a name and a consequence, and in these communities, postponement is the rule.

Between the 10th and 15th of May 2026, that distance was shortened. In an operation conducted with the Barco Sorriso Institute, a multidisciplinary medical and dental team docked at the four communities and carried out 325 consultations, 1,421 procedures and 9 home visits, with 720 medicines delivered directly to patients. There were 73 paediatric consultations and 45 otolaryngological consultations, specialties that, for this population, would normally require a full day's travel to the capital of Amazonas.

In otolaryngology, 43 patients were seen and 26 endoscopic examinations of the ear, nose and throat were performed, all with recording, all with diagnosis completed right there in the community. This was only possible because the endoscopy equipment used is portable. A conventional endoscopy tower relies on a fixed infrastructure, specialised transport and stable installation, something incompatible with a mobile service carried out by boat. Portability reversed the logic: instead of the patient travelling to the examination, the examination travelled to the patient. The clinical impact was immediate: three patients left with a definite surgical indication – septoplasty with tonsillectomy, tonsillectomy with adenoidectomy and simple tympanoplasty – and one was referred for polysomnography. An entire stage of the patient journey, the most expensive and time-consuming, ceased to exist.

“As a surgeon, my desire was to treat the three patients I diagnosed right then and there. But surgery without adequate post-operative care is abandonment disguised as care. What technology can and must do is eliminate the barrier of diagnosis and ensure that when the patient arrives for surgery, they arrive with everything in place, states Dr Vinicius Nickel, CEO and founder of Go Scope.

The action also honestly exposed the limits of the model: a single specialist for the pent-up demand of an entire community creates waiting times. Some patients waited up to four hours. Between one examination and another, there is the time needed to sanitise the equipment. And there is a time that does not appear in any statistics: that of health education. Patients who have never had access to a specialist need to understand the disease that affects them, the reason for the treatment, how to follow it, and this conversation cannot be rushed. However, the Amazonian experience gives the project the confidence and the method to tackle a geographically closer problem: the waiting lists for endoscopic examinations in Paraná. In the state, Law No. 21,242/2022 makes the public disclosure of waiting lists compulsory, and in a consultation carried out on 12 July, we identified at least 1,304 patients waiting in Curitiba, 867 in Guarapuava, 661 in Foz do Iguaçu and 102 in Maringá, with a minimum wait of three months in all municipalities.

Behind every number is an undiagnosed person. The resolutive joint effort, with on-site diagnosis and data integrated into the SUS, is not a one-off act of charity, it is a replicable public policy. And the SUS has already created the instrument to finance it.