INTRODUCTION:
The constitutional right to health in Brazil has given rise to the use of the judiciary to obtain health services. This study examined the duration of health-related lawsuits in Minas Gerais from 2000 to 2020, using data from the state's Court of Justice.

METHODS:
A total of 508,696 lawsuits were analyzed. Duration was calculated as the number of days between case filing and closure. Cases not yet closed were treated as censored. The Kaplan-Meier estimator and Cox model were used to assess the effect of fee waiver, type of court, legal priority, request for preliminary injunction, subject matter of the lawsuit, and jurisdiction. The significance level was set at 5%.

RESULTS:
The median duration of lawsuits was 26.7 months (95% CI: 26.5-26.9). Geographic analysis showed shorter case durations in regions with better socioeconomic conditions. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that private law cases were 28% faster than public law cases. Cases involving medication are 43% slower than those involving other health-related requests. Cases with preliminary injunctions are 17% faster than those without, and when legal priority exists, cases are 26% faster. Fee-waived cases are slower than non-waived cases, and there is evidence that fee waiver has a modifying effect on the level of jurisdiction. Thus, fee-waived cases that conclude in the first instance are faster (11%) than those that conclude in the second instance. Non-waived cases that conclude in the first instance, in turn, are slower than those that conclude in the second instance (48%). Notably, non-waived cases reach the second instance more frequently (37.6%) than waived cases (23.6%).

CONCLUSIONS:
Health-related lawsuits take on average more than two years to be resolved. Lower socioeconomic conditions, fee waiver, no request for injunction, no legal priority, and medication as the subject matter are associated with longer case duration.