The Ministry of Health's General Secretariat, ordered in middle 2001, the development of its institutional portal in order to improve the service to citizens, as well as to adhere to the new Web technologies, in the scope of the modernization and development program from the Portuguese Government.

The portal developed by Sistrade, has as main objective to provide a quality service to the portuguese citizen. Obviously, all the portal was also developed taking into account the Internet accessibility by citizens with special needs, that is, all the site is browsable through the "Tab" key and all links have an associated "tool tip" which describes the content of the link.

The portal contains a SQL database structure in order to make possible that the citizens can obtain the most information possible, with the most quality and in useful time. All databases contain entry, addition, deleting and updating record forms, which is immediately shown online and in real time.

All the backside structure is easily updated, being the updates shown online and in real time. The portal thus allows, in the first place, to inform the citizen about what is, what it does and how it is organized the Ministry of Health General Secretariat.
More, the portal is divided into several sections, being some (if not almost all) of public utility, and other restricted to the Ministry's staff.