In 2014, Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) partnered to launch the country’s first digital platform fully dedicated to Patient Safety.
The goal?
Support Brazil’s national health system (SUS) by giving healthcare professionals, institutions, and citizens access to vital tools, legislation, and training that could reduce medical harm across the country.
The previous experience was fragmented, technical, and hard to navigate. ANVISA needed more than a website—they needed a scalable, accessible platform that could turn public policy into something people would actually use and trust.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) needed to centralize and streamline communication with their key stakeholders: citizens, healthcare services, and the National Health Surveillance System. The goal was to create a unified digital platform that could effectively manage public health information, reports, and alerts, ensuring a more transparent and responsive system for the entire country.
Our core deliverable was a user-centric digital platform that served as a single point of truth for health surveillance in Brazil. This platform needed to be intuitive and accessible to diverse user groups, from individual citizens reporting a health incident to large-scale healthcare systems and government agencies. The final product was a comprehensive hub that improved public health management and strengthened national health surveillance capabilities.
Principal UX Designer
6 Months
2 researchers, 4 devs. 1 PMs
As a Principal UX Designer contracted by PAHO, I was responsible for designing and building the entire front-end experience from UX strategy to implementation.
This project combined public health, communication strategy, technical depth, and empathy: all at a national scale.
The central challenge was bridging the communication gap between multiple distinct user groups, each with different needs and levels of technical literacy. Citizens needed a simple way to report incidents, health services required a robust system for data submission, and ANVISA needed a powerful dashboard for monitoring and analysis.
To tackle this, our research methodology was comprehensive. We began with qualitative interviews and surveys with representatives from each user group to gather their pain points and expectations. This was supplemented by an analysis of existing health communication channels to identify inefficiencies. The insights from this research informed the creation of detailed user personas and journey maps, which were critical for defining the platform’s architecture and ensuring it served everyone effectively.
Based on our research, we defined a set of core functionalities that would unify the user experience and address key pain points. The platform was designed to:
A single repository for all health-related news, alerts, and guidelines.
A simplified form for citizens to report health incidents easily and securely.
A dedicated portal for healthcare services to submit data and comply with national regulations.
A dynamic dashboard for the National Health Surveillance System to track incidents and trends in real-time.
Robust security measures to protect sensitive health data and maintain user privacy.
Reviewed RDC 36/2013, Portaria 529/2013, and ANVISA/PAHO policy materials
Analyzed national healthcare audience behaviors
Benchmarked similar public health platforms across Latin America and the EU
Designed for progressive disclosure so users weren’t overwhelmed by technical content
Created a component-based system for scalability
Prioritized real-world workflows—such as how professionals look for hospital indicators or citizens search for rights
Built the front end manually in HTML/CSS/JS
Integrated with backend engineers for database connectivity
Delivered a platform that could evolve over time without code dependency
This wasn’t just a design project—it was a public health intervention at scale. Designing for ANVISA meant navigating political complexity, legal content, accessibility requirements, and cross-institutional workflows—while keeping the user at the center.
I learned how to turn policy into clarity, regulation into usability, and bureaucracy into action.
And that’s exactly the kind of work I want to keep doing:
Purpose-driven, system-wide, and built to last.
