CARE COORDINATION IN PRIMARY HEALTH CARE IN BRAZIL: CHALLENGES OF MUNICIPAL MANAGEMENT – AN ANALYTICAL ESSAY

Care coordination is a central function of Primary Health Care (PHC) within Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS), aimed at ensuring continuity, comprehensiveness, and integration of care across different levels of the health system. Despite a robust normative framework and the strategic role of municipalities in organizing PHC through the Family Health Strategy, significant structural, managerial, and technological barriers continue to limit the effective implementation of coordinated care. This analytical essay critically examines the challenges of municipal management in operationalizing care coordination in Brazil, focusing on governance fragmentation, operational mechanisms of PHC, and the limits of digital health integration. The analysis highlights that municipal decentralization, while enhancing territorial responsiveness, has also produced substantial inequalities in institutional capacity, resource allocation, and managerial stability. At the operational level, key coordination instruments such as referral and counter-referral systems, multidisciplinary teamwork, care pathways, and matrix support remain inconsistently implemented, resulting in fragmented patient trajectories and weak continuity of care. Furthermore, persistent disparities in infrastructure, workforce stability, and regional health governance undermine the effectiveness of PHC as the coordinating axis of the health system. In addition, the essay discusses the emerging role of digital health systems, including electronic health records and telehealth, as potential enablers of integration. However, issues of interoperability, digital inequality, and insufficient data governance limit their transformative potential. The study argues that care coordination in Brazil remains structurally constrained by the mismatch between normative design and municipal-level implementation capacity, requiring integrated reforms in governance, workforce development, and digital infrastructure.