A remedy for medicine procurement: How Brazil is improving decision-making in a $75 billion market using open data and AI

Each year, US$75 billion is spent on medicines through Brazil’s universal healthcare system. Yet 15 million Brazilians still report not getting the treatment they need. Access varies significantly across the country. In the more rural north of Brazil, residents pay more for essential medicines despite earning less.

A joint initiative between government and civil society, supported by OCP’s Lift program, is helping to improve data-driven management of Brazil’s medicine purchases. In the long-term, this reform could pave the way to strengthening oversight of a complex, high-value sector, and empower patients to receive the care to which they’re entitled. 

Thanks to this collaboration, medical procurement across the country can be compared on a single, free website. With more than 1,500 users after the first month, the platform is now being used by public procurement officials to create price comparisons that help them make better and fairer decisions. 

At a moment when Brazil is redefining its national procurement strategy, the project provides a blueprint for how the country can leverage public procurement to design and implement better public policies. 

Developing Medicamentos Transparentes: Unlocking vital data for better decisions

Launched in April 2025, Medicamentos Transparentes publishes pharmaceutical purchases made by all national and subnational government entities for the last two years, allowing anyone to compare the price of medicines across regions and over time, based on characteristics such as active ingredients, dosage, procurement method, quantity, and supplier. The portal’s simple design is the culmination of substantial work behind the scenes to gather all this information in one place.

Because public procurement in Brazil is decentralized, each state and municipality’s transactions and processes are documented in thousands of different transparency portals and data formats, turning systematic monitoring into an impossible mission. This lack of interoperable data provides a fertile ground for inefficiency and mismanagement, budgeting and supply issues, and prevents civil society and journalists from tracking purchases or detecting overpricing or corruption.

“Strengthening the transparency and monitoring of medicine purchases is fundamental to guaranteeing the right to healthcare access,” said Juliana Sakai, Executive Director of Transparência Brasil.

In 2021, Brazil passed a new public procurement law to modernize government contracting and improve the system’s transparency and efficiency. The legislation requires all 5,568 municipalities, 27 states, and federal entities to disclose their contracting information – across the entire procurement cycle – on a central platform, the National Public Procurement Portal (PNCP for its Portuguese acronym). The law also tasks the government with creating a database of prices for health products, to make patterns in the costs of treatment more transparent and promote more efficient procurement in a sector that dwarfs most other markets in terms of the number of purchases and total spending. But the lack of data standardization across the existing 263 different systems for buying and documenting pharmaceutical purchases in the states and municipalities has been an obstacle to implementing such a “price bank”.

Medicamentos Transparentes solves this issue by consuming open data from the PNCP, structuring it in the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), and using artificial intelligence to classify the items so they can be accurately compared. It was designed to help managers and civil servants ensure greater efficiency in public medicine purchases.

Lucas Pedersoli, who leads procurement price research in the state of Minas Gerais, highlights the value of the portal for procurement planning as well as establishing a common vocabulary for pharmaceutical purchases across the country. 

“The platform has been incredibly useful. The platform’s filters reduce research time, and all medicines are converted into a single medicines catalog rather than multiple catalogs. The data provided not only helped us with price research, but also with other components of market research that are equally important to the success of the process.”

Medicamentos Transparentes was developed with the support of OCP’s Lift impact accelerator program, by a coalition of partners including procurement and oversight authorities and civil society. Transparência Brasil, an independent organization with 25 years’ experience in promoting better public spending, worked together with staff from SEGES, who are responsible for the federal e-procurement system and also manage the PNCP transparency portal. 

Their work was carried out with the close support of the Director of Price Research from the Public Procurement Subsecretariat of the State of Minas Gerais, and key regulatory bodies, the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) and the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), which shared lessons from a previous project focused on analyzing medicine procurement based on invoice data (Analysis of Prices of Tender Items, or APRIL). To gain a deeper understanding of pain points, subnational public buyers were also engaged, such as the state of Minas Gerais and the municipality of São Paulo.

The team’s initial goal was to reduce the cost of overpriced medicines by up to 20%. But shortly after starting their work, they realized how difficult it was to obtain unit prices and to build a consistent price basket that would allow them to establish a baseline and monitor these processes.

So they shifted their focus to achieve that first.

A collaborative open contracting approach

Improving the accessibility and quality of procurement data for medicines was an essential step towards making medicine procurement more fair and efficient. It would allow the team to conduct a comparative analysis of medicine purchases, identifying typical treatment costs and anomalies. Better data could increase the efficiency of procuring entities in determining reference prices to improve value for money. It would also enable more effective oversight and automated monitoring, with a high degree of precision in identifying irregularities and inefficiencies in medicine purchases.

Despite the source system publishing open data through an API, significant limitations in the availability and usability made finding the details needed to conduct the price analysis a time-consuming task. For example, rather than being structured in separate data fields, relevant details were often found in free-text fields. In one case, a public buyer only included the name of the active ingredient of the medication, without detailing its concentration, origin, dosage, and other characteristics that may be relevant. While the complete information may be available in the PDF of the tender or in other documents, these formats are not machine-readable.  

Throughout the project, several working sessions were held in which Transparência Brasil’s team presented their findings on the usability, quality, and coverage of the PNCP’s open data, along with proposed solutions. 

For example, Transparência Brasil conducted a data quality analysis of medicine purchases and identified key gaps in the descriptions of purchases registered in PNCP’s database that made price comparisons difficult. They found that 30% of medicine procurement processes had insufficient or incorrect descriptions. The reports were presented to SEGES, which implemented several recommendations (report 1, report 2, report 3), including 44% (11 out 25 recommendations) related to usability, 30% (3/10) for data access and infrastructure, and 66% (3/5) for data quality. 

“The analysis and feedback provided through these reports were extremely valuable for SEGES, as they allowed us to quickly identify concrete opportunities for improvement in the PNCP. Having evidence-based insights helped us respond more efficiently, prioritize corrective actions, and focus our efforts on the functionalities and data elements that users actually need for effective monitoring and analysis,” says Batista dos Santos. 

Additional stakeholders participated in workshops to make sure the new platform would meet the needs of those most likely to use it. Attendees included subnational public buyers from the state of Minas Gerais and the municipality of São Paulo, who demonstrated early willingness to collaborate, as well as civil society monitors and journalists.

“When health spending increases, it’s very important that there are tools that facilitate the monitoring of this spending and the efficiency of this spending,” highlights Flávia Schmitt, former Director of Open Government and Transparency, CGU. “And it’s critical that we can count on ongoing improvements, collaboration, and research around these tools to promote more effective public policies.”

A unique access point for procurement data to empower the delivery of Brazil’s economic and social goals

The medicine procurement transparency project informed broader efforts to enhance public procurement through digitalization. In fall 2025, SEGES started publishing standardized open data in the Open Contracting Data Standard from its APIs on Compras.gov.br, the mandatory federal e-procurement system. 

The publication includes data to identify sustainability policies and small business participation in public procurement. For the first time, all information on tenders and awards going through the Compras.gov.br system is available in a structured, open, and internationally comparable format. All the details of a procurement process can be obtained from a single access point, using a unique identifier. 

“Medicamentos Transparentes emerged from the creation of the National Public Procurement Portal, because it has this gigantic potential, bringing together data from all over the country on public procurement. It doesn’t generate as many headlines, but it generates a lot of impact,” highlights Juliana Sakai from Transparência Brasil.

The new medicine transparency platform has shown that having high-quality, analysis-ready procurement data is fundamental to implementing reforms that generate savings and improve the delivery of essential public services. 

For other sectors, it demonstrates that, using an open contracting approach, it is possible to make procurement comparable across regions and over time, even in large and highly decentralized markets.

The launch of Medicamentos Transparentes is just the beginning. Its creators now have big plans to promote the use of this tool with public managers, oversight bodies, civil society, journalists, and everyone who wants to improve public health in Brazil.

In a country where millions still struggle to access essential treatment, better data may seem like a technical fix. But when prices are fairer, markets are transparent, and decisions are informed, the impact can be profoundly human. By turning fragmented procurement records into actionable intelligence, open data and AI are not just tools for efficiency — they are instruments for equity. 

As OCP, we are excited to contribute to this compelling project; we will capture and share lessons along the journey, including how the new data informs better buying of medicines and whether prices are coming down for citizens.