He indicated that the Ministry of Finance was working to rid the scheme of accumulated debt to customers, and ensure regular payments, to make the NHIS more efficient.

“We are working on clearing the debt the scheme owes its service providers since May last year,” Mr Agyemang-Manu, said, at the opening of this year’s Ghana Health Service (GHS) first Senior Managers Meeting (SMM1), and launch of the District Health Information Management System (DHIMS2) dashboard and improved cause of death statistics, in Accra.

The minister said that the NHIS owed health facilities for the past 10 to 11 months, and doctors and the health facilities, were distressed, “but we have made some releases to clear part of the debts in 2016.”

Mr Agyeman-Manu said he has directed chief directors of the various health agencies to halt the employment of casual workers.

Dr Anthony Nsia Asare, Director General of the GHS, tasked the health minister to ensure that all debts the NHIS owed its service providers were paid within a month.

He said the GHS was working on employing a sustainable Information Communication Technology platform, to make health delivery effective.

According to Dr Asare, the GHS would soon begin reposting of staff to needy communities in the country, to ensure equity in health care delivery.

“The GHS would now employ the use of technology, to provide tele-medicine and mobile health services for improved delivery,” he said.

The two day meeting is expected to assess challenges of the GHS for 2016 and suggest ways to improve upon its performance this year.

The SSM1, which is an annual event, was held by the GHS to review the services performance for the previous year brought together managers of the health service from across the country.

Participants of the meeting include regional directors of health, directors and programme officers of the various disease control programmes of the GHS, monitoring and evaluation officers among others.

It would also discuss how to utilise the DHIMS2 active dashboard for programme tracking and improving cause of death statistics, which was launched by the health minister at the opening of the meeting.

The new DHIMS2 is a client based data analysing programme developed for hospitals and clinics by the GHS, with support from the Bloomberg Data for health initiative, birth and death registry and the Ghana Statistical service.

By Linda Naa Deide Aryeetey