Development of Industrial Health Complex Program - PROCIS
To incentivize the Brazilian healthcare industry the Brazilian government has created PROCIS, which is the Program for the Development of Industrial Health Complex, that prioritizes the national production of medicine and technology in the healthcare area. In this article you are going to learn about these investments.
Established in 2012, PROCIS aims to strengthen the Brazilian healthcare industry giving greater autonomy to the country. The government makes investments in the national public laboratories for the greater production of medicine that is bought by the government and distributed to the population through SUS, which is the public health system of Brazil. This measure also intended to lower the import of health products and technology and therefore improve national production.
Investments by the Government
Drugs and strategic inputs produced in Brazil are the government's priority when purchasing health care products and technology for SUS. PROCIS invests money in national laboratories in order to:
- Support the modernization and production management structure
- Support the quality of production by maintaining the current Good Manufacturing Practices certificate issued by ANVISA
- Strengthen partnerships between companies for more productive development
- Support the high qualification of management professionals
- Support technology development
- Keep good working relationships between laboratories
- Support public technology and innovation infrastructure for production in Brazil
For this, the Brazilian government demands the implementation of an efficient management system to ensure the effective fulfillment of the objectives set by PROCIS. There is also a need to manage maintenance and planning projects in the following areas:
- Regulatory management
- Quality assurance
- Productive control
- Logistics distribution
- Supplies storage
- Legal support
Margin of Preference on National Healthcare Products
A margin of preference is established as the price difference between goods and services performed in Brazil and foreign goods and services. This ensures the preference to nationally manufactured goods and services.
The application of a margin of preference on purchases by the government aims to stimulate the production and the competitiveness of national companies. This is done by using the purchasing power of the federal government and promoting sustainable national economic development.
This margin is applied to 126 products and they are divided into 78 drugs and pharmaceuticals, 4 inputs and 44 organic products for two or five years, depending on the technological complexity to produce them.
The national production of healthcare products has the following preference margins:
Medication and Drugs
- Produced with imported drugs: 8% preference
- Produced with Brazilian drugs: 20% preference
- Produced in Brazil using separate composition elements: 20%
Necessary Inputs
- Organic drugs and biopharmaceuticals: 25%
- Requested inputs for the production of chosen medications: 20%
The program has invested, from its beginning in 2012, BRL 2 billion in Brazilian production, half from the federal government and half from the state government.
Partnerships Policy for Production Development
Within the context of technological incentives for development in Brazil, the Ministry of Health developed a partnerships policy for production development, called PDP. These involve technology exchanges between public and private laboratories for national production of products to SUS. The partnerships allow the purchase of drugs at gradually reduced prices as the government buys products in large quantities over the years.
Until last year, the Brazilian government had established 88 PDPs by the Ministry of Health that worked on 77 products including 64 medicines, 7 vaccines, 4 drugs and 4 research developments.
With these measures, the Brazilian government has reduced regional inequalities by stimulating the strengthening of laboratories in Brazil.