Portugal Swaps Its Two-Decade-Old Surgery-List System for an AI Platform on 1 August, as Doctors Warn of a Cosmetic Fall in the Queues
On 1 August Portugal shuts down SIGIC, the 20-year-old system that managed surgical waiting lists, and moves every record to a new AI-driven platform, SINACC. The government calls it a transparency upgrade; the Ordem dos Médicos and the PS warn it could shrink the backlog on paper without treating a
From Saturday, the software that has managed Portugal’s surgical waiting lists for two decades disappears. On 1 August the public health service switches off SIGIC — the Sistema Integrado de Gestão de Inscritos para Cirurgia (Integrated System for Managing Surgery Registrations) — and migrates every patient record to a new platform, the Sistema Nacional de Gestão do Acesso a Consultas e Cirurgia (National System for Managing Access to Appointments and Surgery), or SINACC. The government calls the old system technologically obsolete; its critics say the changeover risks making waiting lists look shorter without a single extra operation being done.
The new platform starts by handling surgery, the same job SIGIC did, and is meant to expand later to specialist appointments (consultas) and diagnostic tests (meios complementares de diagnóstico e terapêutica). Its headline feature is automation: once every hospital is connected, SINACC is designed to use artificial intelligence to flag waiting-list problems directly to hospital boards and department heads, rather than leaving them buried in monthly returns. Health Minister Ana Paula Martins has framed it as a transparency upgrade, and insisted that the “additional surgical production” scheme — extra operations carried out beyond normal hours to clear backlogs — remains an important tool that will continue under the new system.
Why doctors and the opposition are uneasy
The Ordem dos Médicos (Medical Association) has warned that the transition carries risks to the transparency, equity and monitoring of the lists. Its central fear is an “artificial reduction” of waiting numbers — a fall on the dashboard that reflects how patients are counted rather than any real improvement in how fast they are treated or in the capacity of the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (National Health Service, SNS) to respond.
Part of that concern predates the software. Two orders published in June, Portarias 274/2026 and 281/2026, reclassified a range of procedures as “minor surgery” that no longer has to be entered on the surgical waiting list at all. Supporters say those small interventions never belonged in the same queue as major operations; opponents say removing them from the register is the simplest way to make the headline backlog shrink.
The Socialist Party (PS), now in opposition, has gone further, accusing the government of taking patients off the lists — both through the minor-surgery reclassification and, it says, by moving to strip out Portuguese citizens living abroad. The party called that “unacceptable” and urged close scrutiny of how SINACC is populated in its first weeks. The row echoes a parallel dispute this summer over the SNS patient registry, where a national clean-up threatened to remove emigrants and long-absent users from family-doctor lists.
The backdrop: extra operations under audit
The changeover also lands while the “additional production” model is under scrutiny. An inspection by the health regulator IGAS drew attention after a single dermatologist was found to have been paid roughly €700,000 over three years for extra surgeries, and doctors have separately pressed the government to undo rules that led some hospitals to halt those extra operations altogether. By keeping the scheme alive but routing it through a system that can, in theory, spot anomalies automatically, the government is betting that better data will let it defend a mechanism that has become both a pressure valve for the SNS and a target for its watchdogs.
The new system was promulgated by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa back in January, despite his own stated “doubts” about it. For patients, nothing changes at the point of care on Saturday: anyone already booked for surgery keeps their place, and their record moves across automatically. What changes is behind the screen — and whether, a few months from now, a shorter waiting list turns out to mean shorter waits, or simply a shorter way of counting. If you are new to the system, our guide to registering with the SNS explains how access to public care works in the first place.
