About

Sanitas is a major health supplier, being the head of UK-based Bupa’s European and Latin American services, which overall accounts for €2.9bn in revenue and over 29,000 employees. Alongside this, Sanitas is headquartered in Madrid and is Spain’s largest private healthcare group, making it a prominent part of the Spanish business landscape. The Sanitas legal team, as one would expect for such a highly-regarded company in a heavily regulated sector, is expertly organised. Key figures include general counsel Mónica Paramés, who coordinates the legal team’s strategy with top management, and legal lead Miguel Escalona who reports into her and directly oversees the legal team of 28 lawyers under his jurisdiction. The team has, in common with the rest of the company, been heavily involved in innovation, digitalisation and coordination of its services. This has paid dividends with the company’s successful acquisition of a 100% stake in their Chilean subsidiary, which required close cooperation between the Spanish and Chilean legal teams, necessitating not only complex legal work but efforts to align business and cultural practices between both companies. Further evidence of the legal team fostering a successful integration of business units comes with the 2016 restructure that saw responsibilities for Poland fall under the Spanish-based Sanitas banner. The team has managed to achieve these successes in incorporation via their proactive approach to innovation, an attitude that has also borne fruit via its support of the implementation of the Blua digital health insurance project, a ground-breaking initiative that allows customers to receive video consultations digitally from their own homes. The Sanitas legal team has contributed heavily to the implementation and refinement of this scheme as well as the mitigation of many of the legal implications of such an endeavour, especially in the fields of confidentiality, liability and diagnostic responsibility. In terms of more traditional legal work, the Sanitas legal team has also been intimately connected to the company’s M&A activity, providing direct input to the teams in charge of this, and has also been making every effort to ensure the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is adopted by the company as smoothly as possible. The range, scope and complexity of the projects undertaken by the Sanitas legal team, combined with the highly regulated and sensitive industry they operate in, place them in the top division of in-house legal teams in Iberia.