SNS, pharmaceutical innovation and AI in healthcare: highlights from the Healthcare Economics conference

On 5 May, the João Morais Leitão Auditorium in Lisbon hosted the conference "Healthcare Economics: Sustainability and Innovation", organised by Jornal Económico in partnership with Morais Leitão. The event brought together experts, industry representatives, institutional leaders and sector professionals to discuss the key challenges and opportunities shaping healthcare economics in Portugal.

Across several panels, participants addressed topics including the financial sustainability of the healthcare system, technological innovation, financing models, digital transformation and the role of public policy. One of the panels was moderated by Fernanda Matoso, Partner at Morais Leitão.

Prevention and health literacy as a response to an ageing population

The "Trends and Opportunities" panel focused on the impact of demographic ageing on the healthcare system and on strategies to ease the pressure on services. Helena Freitas, Country Lead of Sanofi Portugal, argued that health should be seen as a value rather than a problem, noting that governments tend to focus on expenditure rather than outcomes. In her view, the way forward lies in investing in health literacy and prevention, particularly through vaccines and early intervention in cardiovascular disease.

Óscar Gaspar, President of the Portuguese Association of Private Hospitalisation (APHP), highlighted the growing difficulty of attracting young people to medicine, a trend already evident across central Europe. He also challenged what he described as a false dichotomy between the public and private sectors, noting that the SNS has never had as many healthcare professionals as it does today.

Carlos Ribeiro, General Manager of Takeda Portugal, addressed the challenges facing pharmaceutical supply chains in the wake of the pandemic, wars and tariffs, stressing the limitations on price adjustment in a highly regulated sector and the need to streamline the bureaucratic processes surrounding clinical trials.

Data, pharmaceutical innovation and the role of the regulator

Hermano Rodrigues, from EY-Parthenon, presented an overview of healthcare economics in Portugal, where expenditure reached €29.2 billion in 2024, equivalent to 10.2% of GDP, above the OECD average. He highlighted that the SNS faces growing pressure, with around 1.6 million patients without a family doctor and one million on waiting lists for hospital appointments.

In the "Value with Potential" panel, Antonieta Lucas, President of Apormed, revealed that investment in medical technologies, including those enabling outpatient surgery, had generated savings of €800 million. João Almeida Lopes, President of Apifarma, highlighted the innovative agreement reached with the Government in March 2025 to control public expenditure on medicines, and the conversion of an extraordinary state levy into an incentive for investment in Portugal.

Rui Santos Ivo, President of Infarmed, presented the "Process Tracker", a new regulatory tool that will allow the monitoring of funding applications for new medicines and improve the transparency and predictability of the system. He expressed confidence in the revision of European pharmaceutical legislation as a driver of competitiveness and called for an integrated view of the medicine lifecycle.

Public, private and PPP: a false dichotomy

The panel "Treating the Portuguese: Public, Private, PPP" brought together José Bento, President of Hospital de Cascais, Xavier Barreto, President of the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators (APAH), and Tamara Milagre, President of Associação Evita. The central message was that the divide between public and private is outdated. José Bento stressed that hospital management should not be driven by funding constraints but by clinical outcomes, and called for greater coordination across all three models, public, private and PPP, to achieve better results. Xavier Barreto noted that the SNS recorded its highest ever activity in 2025, yet demand continues to outpace capacity.

Artificial intelligence: potential with limits

In the debate on technological innovation, Ana Gil Abreu Marques, General Counsel and Compliance Officer of Siemens Healthineers in Portugal, argued that artificial intelligence will be a major driver of innovation in healthcare, particularly in diagnostics and clinical response, but cautioned that it should not be seen as a universal solution. Its adoption must be accompanied by literacy efforts among both healthcare professionals and patients, and should begin by addressing more basic, concrete problems.

Mécia Fonseca, from Novartis, highlighted that biological medicines represent not only clinical gains but also broader societal value through the reduction of hospitalisations, and warned of the growing gap between the pace of technological innovation and that of regulation, as well as Portugal's loss of competitiveness relative to Spain in attracting clinical trials.