Social control and performance evaluation of health systems in times of webcontrol

Abstract

This essay aimed at inquiring how, in Brazil, public control (‘social control’) is being done, especially in contemporaneity, when the internet enters as an element to make even more complex the ways to the effective exercise of the control of health policy performance. For this purpose, the characteristics of performance of this kind of public control in administrative sciences and their influence on health assessment processes were addressed, the complexity involved in the option of taking ‘health systems’ as ‘objects’ of performance evaluation and, still, the ability of the contemporary subject to participate in ‘social control’ in its virtual form. A suggested possibility for this participation, without necessarily being institutionalized, may have as its starting point the elaboration of the collective opinion derived from the capture and processing of the individual perceptions made available on the performances, in all the electronic sites in the ‘web’.