Press Release: EQUI-PHARM and INVIS_AI were selected in the 2026 edition of the "la Caixa" Foundation's Social Research Call. The projects seek to address two contemporary challenges: inequalities in access to healthcare and the impact of artificial intelligence on access to political information.
Two projects from the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP) were selected in the 2026 edition of the Social Research Call initiative of the "la Caixa" Foundation's Social Observatory, a competitive programme that supports research aimed at understanding and addressing some of today's major social challenges.
The funded projects — EQUI-PHARM and INVIS_AI — share the use of innovative data science methodologies to produce knowledge that is useful to society and support evidence-based public policies. One of the projects, EQUI-PHARM, will be funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), as part of the partnership established between the two institutions.
Improving access to medicines through data
Despite the universal coverage provided by the National Health Service, inequalities in effective access to medicines persist, particularly among economically vulnerable populations. In Portugal, around 60% of households' direct healthcare expenditure corresponds to the purchase of medicines, making it essential to understand how economic and geographical factors affect access to prescribed treatments.
Led by Lília Perfeito, the project EQUI-PHARM – Quantifying Socio-Economic Barriers to Pharmaceutical Access in Portugal Using Digital Records will use national electronic prescription and medicines dispensing data to develop new indicators that can measure economic and territorial barriers to access to medication.
By analysing patterns of medicines not being purchased, delays associated with income cycles, and geographical differences in accessibility to pharmacies, the project will create the EQUI-PHARM Monitor, a decision-support tool for health administrations and public policymakers, enabling them to identify situations of vulnerability and guide more effective interventions.
"The first step towards tackling inequalities in access to healthcare is diagnosing who the populations at risk are, and where they are located. The EQUI-PHARM project aims to analyse access to medicines among the Portuguese population, using administrative and demographic data combined with models informed by clinical practice. The tool we are going to create can then be used by local or national entities to design and target programmes to mitigate inequalities," says Lília Perfeito, the project's principal investigator.
The project involves the collaboration of healthcare professionals, ensuring that the results produced address the needs of citizens and the healthcare system.
"These synergies make it easier to frame the implementation of research results within the needs of the system and to translate them into useful responses that can be more readily introduced into healthcare provision," emphasises Margarida Gil Conde, physician and civil society partner in the project.
Making artificial intelligence systems more transparent
Every day, millions of people turn to search engines and artificial intelligence-based language models to access information, including political information. The INVIS_AI project, led by Joana Gonçalves-Sá, will investigate how these systems organise and prioritise this information, whether they introduce biases, and how these affect the visibility of political parties and issues in Portugal and Spain.
To this end, the team will combine large-scale automated audits with experimental studies, making it possible to analyse the path from the information presented by platforms to its potential impact on citizens' perceptions.
The main outcomes will include an open infrastructure for auditing digital platforms and a new measure of pluralism — the Pluralism Gap — which will make it possible to compare the political visibility promoted by search engines and language models with independent indicators of political reality.
Developed in partnership with researcher Pedro Magalhães from the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) and the Regulatory Authority for the Media (ERC), the project will adopt a comparative approach between Portugal and Spain to understand how these systems operate across different languages, media ecosystems, and political contexts. The methodologies and tools developed can be adapted to other European countries, contributing to evidence-based public policies and regulatory practices.
"Algorithmic systems play an increasingly important role in how we access information. Understanding rigorously how they organise this information and how this process varies across different countries, languages, and contexts is essential to supporting public policy and regulation," says Joana Gonçalves-Sá, the project's principal investigator.
"The transformation of the media ecosystem and the growing complexity of the ways in which political communication and access to political information take place pose new challenges to the analysis of pluralism. Deepening and adapting analytical models to this reality is essential to the work carried out by the ERC in the area of political pluralism, regardless of the technological platforms through which communication takes place. Establishing partnerships with academia and research centres is one of the ERC's strategic priorities for 2023–2028, and we are enthusiastic about joining this research," says Carla Martins, on behalf of the ERC.
Science at the service of society
The selection of these two projects confirms LIP's commitment to interdisciplinary research with social impact, bringing together experts in complex systems, social sciences, public health, and artificial intelligence, in collaboration with public institutions and civil society organisations.