“Public-private partnerships have a very strict structure”: it is necessary to change the paradigm

Isabel Vaz, CEO of Luz Saúde; Vasco Antunes Pereira, CEO of Lusíadas Saúde; Roy Denise, CEO of CUF; Luis Joyce Pinheiro, Chairman of the Department of Health’s Shared Services Board (SPMS), was this evening, at SIC Notícias, discussing the future of health now that the epidemic has begun to slow and the disease is endemic. Also present at the meeting were Sofia Marta, Vice President in charge of Health District at Accenture Portugal, and these were the main conclusions.

“We entered the competition, but the conditions are not sustainable.”

Vasco Antunes Pereira, CEO of Lusíadas Saúde (in competition for the Cascais PPP Hospital)

Using technology to improve care

• The pandemic has made patients and healthcare professionals more familiar with digital solutions, and made them better accept them in their lives and professional practices. This makes it easier, from now on, to use technology more as a way to improve and make healthcare more personalized.
• Isabel Vaz explains that it is technology that will allow “health professionals to focus more on patients,” because it will be the technology that will perform those routine tasks with the least added value. Indeed, according to Luís Goes Pinheiro, if the SNS 24 telephone line had not been automated, it would have been impossible to respond to the “enormous” volume of more than three million calls received this year alone.
• Roy Dennis agrees, and stresses that technology will have an impact on increasing people’s access to health care, via digital. But Vasco Antonis Pereira, despite his agreement, notes that in the current transitional phase, it is necessary to keep some services in physical and digital form.

300 million euros

• The value of the PRR for digital transformation in healthcare

Special services available to support SNS

• The three private health groups in the discussion are not dismissive of new public-private partnerships (PPP) with the National Health Service (SNS), but they caution that the contracts in place so far must be different.
• Isabel Vaz says they should be contracts “strategic and predictable”; Roy Denise says they have to take into account the cost increases that come from technological innovations. In fact, he asserts that “public-private partnership contracts have a very strict structure” and that “ [que existiu] It cannot continue.” On the other hand, Vasco Antunes Pereira notes the fact that contracts require savings that will translate into “worse healthcare.”