World Bank grants $27.7m concessionary funding to NHIS

The funding will enable the scheme to increase its population coverage, register more poor and vulnerable people, and ensure the prompt processing and payment of claims for primary health care (PHC) providers.

The PHCs comprise community-based health planning services (CHPS) compounds, health centres and maternity homes under the Primary Health Care Improvement.

A health economist with the World Bank, Enoch Oti Agyekum, confirmed the funding to the Daily Graphic last Thursday on the sidelines of a training programme for claims management in Accra.

Mr Agyekum stated that available data from the public expenditure review conducted by the World Bank indicated that over 80 per cent of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) facilities were made up of health centres, maternity homes and CHPS compounds, but constituted 17 per cent when it came to claims to those facilities.

Mr Agyekum said at a training programme that it had been realised at the third-tier level — the primary health care — that the facilities were the least efficient in processing claims and that “over the last three years, we see that efficiency going down”.

The health economist said the facilities were disadvantaged because a lot of the people who resorted to those centres were people who could not afford the co-payment if the facilities wanted to charge because they were the very poor in the communities.

The health economist said he knew that the NHIS had the capacity to deliver more and better with the support of the Ministry of Finance