After becoming the Greek Government’s technology partner in 2025 to transform its national health line with AI, and announcing a groundbreaking partnership with Portugal’s National Health Service (SNS) in June this year, Sword is now expanding its portfolio of government partnerships beyond the Atlantic.
During the opening session of the 21st Brazilian Congress of Health Informatics, Brazil’s Minister of Health, Alexandre Padilha, announced a strategic partnership with Sword, followed by the formal signing of a Technology Cooperation Agreement (ACT) outlining the broad range of healthcare challenges Sword will help Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS) address through its technology.
SUS is the world’s largest universal public healthcare system, serving more than 210 million people.
The agreement encompasses an innovative program to help transform Brazil’s healthcare system through Sword’s technology. This includes the design, testing and implementation of AI across different levels of the SUS, at federal, state and municipal level. Applications will include voice and text-based clinical triage, intelligent waiting list prioritisation and scheduling, clinical decision support, and health prevention and promotion.
Given the scale of the SUS and the ambition behind the partnership from Brazil’s Ministry of Health, this is set to become Sword’s broadest collaboration with a national health system to date.
Technical work will begin in early 2027, when teams from SUS and Sword will define the first transformation projects and implementation roadmap. Following the milestone of reaching one million patients treated through its AI powered technology worldwide, Sword will now have the opportunity to bring its technology to a healthcare system serving 210 million people.
Brazil has one of the world’s largest public health systems and it faces the same problem as all such systems: demand is growing faster than capacity. Sword is solving that problem – expanding access to care and helping these systems to scale. We began working in the UK, Greece and Portugal over the last year, and we are proud to be partnering with Brazil’s Minister of Health, with the opportunity to reach more than 210 million people.”
Sword founder and CEO Virgílio Bento.
“Innovation without access should not even be called innovation. Innovation without access is injustice. It widens the gap between those who have access to what is innovative and those who do not,” said Brazil’s Minister of Health, Alexandre Padilha, yesterday afternoon in Brasília, during the 21st Brazilian Congress of Health Informatics (CBIS’26).
“It is very important that Sword is here today. We are taking this opportunity to witness and strengthen this partnership between the Ministry and these institutions, which are part of Portugal’s National Public Health System.”
“Through this partnership, we can also work on developing artificial intelligence tools and bring that knowledge and experience home to our communities, building more of our own tools that are tailored to our needs,” the Minister of Health added.
The agreement with Brazil comes just months after Sword entered Portugal’s National Health Service, with the goal of making AI powered care solutions available across public hospitals and health centres at no cost to patients. Sword already works directly with healthcare systems in the UK, Germany, and Greece.
About Sword
For most of history, access to high-quality healthcare has been a privilege of circumstance. Sword exists to change that. As a frontier AI company, Sword builds the foundational models that healthcare needs, training them for clinical reasoning and safety. Its AI Care platform puts those models to work alongside licensed clinicians and care teams, treating more than 1 million patients directly across physical pain, women's health, mental health, and cardiometabolic care, and orchestrating care for millions more worldwide. Sword is trusted by more than 2,500 of the world’s most sophisticated organizations, including sovereign governments, the US military, and the largest Fortune 500 companies, delivering high-quality care and more than $1.5 billion in healthcare savings to date.
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