An orthopedic surgeon in Pasto wants to try a plate system he saw at a course in Bogotá. He asks the surgical technologist who supplies it in Nariño, and she doesn't know. He searches for the brand on Google and lands on the importer's website: a home page with the international brand's logo, a video of the office in Bogotá, and a WhatsApp button. The site doesn't say whether they cover the south of the country, or whether someone can support the first surgery. It also doesn't say that the company has a training center a few hours from there.
A market of importers
Most of what's used in a Colombian operating room is imported. Domestic implant manufacturing exists, but it's small, and the market is driven by importers and distributors that represent foreign brands. Often two competitors offer the same brand, or very similar ones.
When the product is the same, buyers decide based on other things: who has the material available in their city, who sends a surgical technologist to the operating room, who trains the team, who responds when something goes wrong. Those are the things a Colombian distributor's website has to tell, and it usually doesn't.
Purchasing is split by region
Public entities contract through SECOP II, the transactional platform of Colombia Compra Eficiente, where they publish and award their procurement processes. Private clinics buy outside that platform, generally through the distributor they already work with. In both cases, the decision is made close to the hospital: in each department and each institution, not in a single national negotiation.
For the website, this means coverage is product information. A page that says which cities and departments the company serves, who to talk to in each region, and where the material ships from gives the surgeon in Pasto what he came looking for. If the company works with sub-distributors in some areas, they go on that page too, by name (we go into this in Who represents what in each country).
Training, documented
In Colombia, several companies in the industry train surgeons and surgical technologists at their own centers, and some run courses endorsed by the Sociedad Colombiana de Cirugía Ortopédica y Traumatología (SCCOT). It's the most valuable thing they have to show, because the endorsement of a specialty society can't be obtained through advertising.
On many websites it appears as a single line: “we have training centers.” What would be worth seeing is each center with its city, each course with its date, its faculty, and the endorsement it received, and what remained from the course (a presentation, a technique video, a gallery) linked to the product pages for the products used. That way, last year's course keeps working for the company (we cover this in A two-day cadaver lab, six photos, and a short article).
The registration, in INVIMA's format
The Guía digital de publicidad para dispositivos médicos y equipos biomédicos from INVIMA (Colombia) states that every advertising piece must show the registration number of each product, “clear, visible, and legible, regardless of the advertising medium.” And it gives an example of how it's written: “Registro Sanitario INVIMA 20XXDM-000XXXX”.
On the product page, then, the number goes in as data for each product or group of products, in its own field and in the guide's format, next to the name of the registration holder, which in a market of importers is usually the importer and not the manufacturer. Anyone can check it in INVIMA's own public registration lookup, by number or by product name. If the field is on the product page, it appears the same way in the downloadable catalog and on each product line's page, and when a registration changes, it's corrected in one place. The guide also states that INVIMA's logo isn't used in advertising: the number is enough.
Which parts of the website need INVIMA authorization before they're published is defined by the company's regulatory team (we go into this in Publishing a product that isn't registered in the country yet). On the website side, what changes is that each product page has an identifiable version, so it's clear which one was published.
Congresses
In orthopedics, the reference point is the SCCOT national congress, held once a year, and the courses the society organizes in different cities throughout the year. The calendar is on the SCCOT website. For a company with national coverage, a course in Medellín or Cartagena is an opportunity to show its regional coverage with specific names: who from the team was there and who to write to afterward.
What's usually missing
In August 2026, we reviewed six websites of Colombian orthopedic companies, including importers, distributors, and one manufacturer. None had a news section, a blog, or a record of their courses. One showed a different headquarters address in the text and in the footer. Another was down on the day of the review.
The clearest case was a distributor with more than thirty years in the market, four training centers, and courses endorsed by the scientific society, whose website mentioned them without documenting any of them. The photos from those courses were on its Instagram, which the website didn't link to.
At the other end, a domestic manufacturer published the INVIMA registration numbers for each product line on its website, as the guide requires, and had a technical story of its own to tell that didn't appear on any page.
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