Health promotion and diseases prevention programs as strategy for integrality in Brazilian private health care

Introduction: Integrality is the foundation around which management practices are organized and whose main challenge is guaranteeing access to multidiscipline and intersectorial health care actions. The National Agency for Supplementary Health (ANS), a government regulation agency, tied with the Health Ministry in Brazil, when considering an improvement policy for the private health care sector, intended to institute a new landmark in the regulation process, recognizing the sector as a place for health production. In view of the changes in the morbimortality population profile, the demographic, epidemiologist and nutricional transistions, and the increase on costs of health assistance, private health insurance companies were stimulated to adopt health promotion and diseases prevention programs . ANS´s induction strategies to the development and implementation of the programs by the private health companies occurred in the period of 2004 to 2008. Purpose: To check the profile of the health promotion and diseases prevention programs offered by the health insurance companies to its beneficiaries. Methodology: Evaluation of the programs was made through an eletronic semi-structured questionnaire, that was sent to all private health companies in Brazil. Results: The questionnaire was answered by 1353  companies of the sector and the main results were: (1) 47.5% of the private health companies performs programs, (2) the most frequent areas of attention, related in the programs, were: adult/elderly health (73.8%), women health  (49.6%), child health (30.9%), oral health (24.6%), adolescent health (20.9%) and mental health (13.1%), (3) the main results achieved were: (1) reduction in assistential costs, (2) reduction in urgency/emergency and  (3) reduction in hospital internments numbers. Conclusion: As an unprecedented initiative in Brazilian public administration, results evidence the positive effects of the strategies adopted by ANS and their impacts on the private health care improvement.