How months of behind-the-scenes preparation went into making Rio de Janeiro ready for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games – and the future.

This Friday, the world turns its attention to Rio de Janeiro. The city will become the center stage for new records, exceptional displays of character, and historical moments of sportsmanship.

Over 10,000 athletes from 206 nations will compete in 28 ­different sports in Rio this year, and they will be closely followed by around half a million tourists. As with all the world’s greatest shows, a huge amount of unseen work is going on behind the scenes to make sure these Games, the first ever to be hosted in Latin America, go smoothly.

Over 1,000 infrastructure projects were undertaken in Brazil’s Olympic host cities in the run-up to the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games. Over 170 projects were implemented in Rio alone, including important, wide-reaching investments in healthcare.

During the Games, state-of-the-art medical equipment ­designed for the health and well-being of athletes and their teams will be available in the emergency areas of the sporting arenas, at the Polyclinic located in the Olympic Village, and ­in the reference medical-hospital complex for the Games: the Americas Medical City.

To keep everyone, be they athletes or spectators, at the top of their game, facilities have been equipped with some of the most advanced medical tech on the market today. These include a smartphone-sized ultrasound scanner that can quickly image anything from knee injuries to blood vessels, and a super-fast, Industrial Internet-powered Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system that will grant doctors access to patients’ medical records – from scans to drug histories – from the Cloud, eliminating the need to ship cumbersome pallets of paper records around the world.

“Our goal is to care for the health of athletes and work with physicians from around the world to offer the best technologies for assertive decision-making,” said Daurio Speranzini Jr., CEO of GE Healthcare in Latin America. “We are focused on providing fast responses to allow the athletes to show their best performance in the Olympic games they have trained for for years.”

The boost to Brazil’s healthcare will not wear off once the Games leave town. Souza Aguiar Hospital, one of the largest emergency centers in Rio, and Brazil, will be given 2 million dollars’ worth of equipment, from surgical arms to diagnostic imaging technologies, anesthesia devices and IT software to digitally ­store all radiology scans securely – a first for the hospital.

In practice, this donation will cut down queues for examinations and expand the number of potential surgeries the hospital can carry out by up to 30%.

“This streamlines care at this emergency hospital, a place where time makes all the difference for the patient’s life,” said Dr. Antonio Araújo de Costa, General Director of Souza Aguiar Hospital.