News:
June 22, 2012
The Minister of Health, Alban Bagbin has said that the National Health Insurance Authority has received significant organizational strengthening and implementation of new initiatives in the last threes years which has impacted positively on its efficiency.
According to him the new divisions namely Clinical Audit, Clan and Strategy and Cooperate affairs have all been created under it.
This came to light when the Minister was responding to a question posed by MP for Jaman South Hon. Yaw Afful who wanted to know the staff’s strength at the head office and the regional offices of the National Health Insurance Authority for the year 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Hon. Bagbin said the Internal Audit division has been significantly beefed-up with diverse professionals to be able to provide risk management and assurance services, whereas the regional offices have significantly been strengthened with accountants and monitoring and evaluation staff.
He said some of the initiatives implemented since 2009 include Clinical Audit which have recovered over 18 million Ghana cedis to cover payment to providers by the schemes, scaling up of ICT implementation, and accreditation of health care providers which has contributed to quality of service improvement.
Others include consolidation and automation of claim processing, professionalization of human resource management, scaling up of internal audit, strategy formulation and communication among others.
According to Mr. Bagbin the success of a foregoing initiative has required the emplacement of appropriate human resources both in numbers and skill felt.
This he said has being critical for the successes that has been achieved with fraud and abuse minimization, cost containment, speedy processing of claim, improve stakeholder engagement, improve monitoring and evaluation, strengthening research capacity and improved financial management.
He gave the staff numbers of the NHIA both at the headquarters and Regional offices as 2008= 141, 200o9= 181, 2010= 348, 2011= 414, 2012 fought- up to 424 respectively.