monday

The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) is to launch a new platform in December this year  to allow clients of the National Health Insurance Scheme(NHJS) to renew their annual membership on their mobile phones.

The system would be relying on the mobile money banking system and the system is expected to permit the clients to renew their membership on any of the mobile money platforms.

This was announced by Mr Oswald Essuah-Mensah of the Public Affairs Department of the NHIA at a media briefing at Koforidua.

He explained that the initiative was the beginning of the total digitalization of the system of enrolment of new clients unto the NHIS, renewal of membership, submission, processing and payment of claims to support efforts of the government towards universal health coverage of the country.

Mr Essuah-Mensah said the new system would enable the NHIA to prompt NHIS clients when their date for renewal was drawing near.

He said the new system would also allow the scheme to cross check from their clients for them to confirm if they had visited the health facility that had submitted claims for service rendered to them.

Mr Essuah-Mensah said the new system would enable electronic receipting of payments made to the NHIS and this would help reduce corruption in the NHIS.

He said  the new system is expected  to reduce the long queues’ for renewal  of subscription and help raise the number of active members of the scheme well above the current active membership of near 11 million membership.

 Mr Essuah-Mensah said the new system would allow service providers to electronically submit their claims, which would help in fast processing and early payment of service providers.

  He said henceforth staff and service providers who engaged in fraud in the scheme would be prosecuted.

He said the new system would not affect the renewals for pregnant women and the needy, because NHIA staff would need to see physically pregnant women for such persons to benefit from the provisions of the scheme for pregnant women.

 He said the needy, would need to provide documents from the Social Welfare Departments to confirm their status to enable them to be exempted from the payment of subscriptions.