More than 15 million Brazilians lack access to essential medicines. Part of the problem lies in the way the government purchases medicines: fragmented processes, unstructured data, and a lack of transparency reduce efficiency and hinder monitoring and oversight. The Transparent Medication Price Index, developed by Transparência Brasil in partnership with the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU), the Ministry of Management and Innovation (MGI), the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), and the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP)—through the Lift program—was created to address this problem.

The platform aggregates and standardizes thousands of data points on public health procurement from more than 5,000 municipalities and 27 Brazilian states—information that was previously scattered across 263 different systems. As a result, public officials, auditors, and civil society now have access to a unified overview of drug procurement across the country, enabling them to compare prices, identify irregularities, and verify whether contracting entities are complying with the requirement of the New Law on Bidding and Contracts (14,133/2021) to consult the Health Price Database before making purchases.

The Data Challenge

For this monitoring to be possible, a fundamental problem had to be solved: the National Public Procurement Portal (PNCP), which centralizes the country’s public procurement, published approximately 12 million purchase items in 2024 alone, but none of them were identified as medicines. The descriptions are recorded as free-form text, without standardization, which made manual classification unfeasible on the required scale.

The solution was to use artificial intelligence to automatically cross-reference these descriptions with the federal drug catalog and classify each item. In tests comparing the model to 1,000 manually labeled items, the model achieved 98% accuracy in classification and 86% accuracy in identifying the correct medication in the national catalog.

Next Steps

With the platform now operational, the focus is on expanding its use among subnational and local purchasers throughout Brazil, so that the data generated can guide more efficient purchasing decisions, help lower prices, and, consequently, increase the population’s access to the medicines they need.