Luís Lapão
Professor of Health Management, Innovation and Digital Health @ IHMT - Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical
Coordinator @ IDeaS Intelligent Decision-Support Systems Laboratory
Member @ WHO Collaborating Center for Health Workforce Policy and Planning, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Member @ WHO-Europe Technical Advisory Group on Health Emergency, Resilience and Preparedness
(...), we should seek to use scientific evidence to better engage citizens, and apply engineering (...) to optimize processes, ensuring respect for professionals and enabling them to deliver higher-quality care in health services that are more efficient and safer.
About
Prof. Dr. Luís Lapão — professor of Health Management, Innovation & Digital Health, systems engineer, and advisor shaping resilient, tech-enabled healthcare.
For Prof. Lapão, the future of health means being more professional, less amateur: using scientific evidence to engage citizens and digital engineering & AI to optimize care pathways—so professionals can deliver safer, higher-quality services with respect and efficiency.
A Stanford University/Elsevier World’s Top 2% Scientist (2024 & 2025), he has led and advised across academia and policy: Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Health Workforce Policies & Planning (UNL, 2023–24); member of the WHO-Europe Technical Advisory Group on Health Emergency, Resilience & Preparedness; Visiting Professor at Karolinska Institutet; and designer of leadership and innovation programs in Portugal and Brazil. He coordinates the IDeas – Intelligent Decision-Support Systems Lab and holds a PhD in Systems Engineering (Smart Healthcare) with habilitation in Health Information Systems/Global Health.