The measures include registration officers working for longer hours and during weekends, when and where necessary; the deployment of more equipment where patronage is very high; and the use of a booking system which schedules clients to appear at various times of the day to avoid spending unnecessarily long hours waiting for their turns at the various registration centres.
In addition to these, pregnant women and the aged are to receive special attention while a mobile team is being set up to be moving around to provide assistance to districts and registration centres with congestion problems.
Mr Perry Nelson, Director, Management Information Systems of the NHIA, who made these known at news conference in Accra, advised subscribers of the health insurance scheme to visit the NHIA offices for the biometric cards only when their old NHIS cards are near expiration because the old cards remain valid.
This, Mr Nelson said, would reduce the congestion and long queues at the NHIA centres where the instant biometric cards were being issued.
In his remarks, Mr Nathaniel Otoo, Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of Operations, said the NHIA would deploy effective crowd management measures, optimise the performance of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) system and use public education as a tool to reduce the challenges that had affected the smooth-running of the biometric registration exercise.
Mr Otoo noted that with an active membership of 9.8 million, expected to increase by 3.5 percentage points, and 27 million hospital visits, there was bound to be challenges.
The NHIA is currently implementing a Biometric Membership Solution (BMS) as a means of resolving card management challenges that have bedevilled the efficient operations of the National Health Insurance Scheme.
The roll-out of the instant issuance of ID cards, based on biometric data started in January 2014 in the Greater Accra region after a pilot, which took place between June and December 2013, targeting the security personnel in two districts―Ayawaso and La.
By the close of this week, all districts in the Greater Accra, Central and the Eastern regions will have been covered while the Ashanti region will be the next to join the instant ID card issuance regime, and the whole country expected to be covered by the end of the year 2014.
The instant Biometric Membership ID Card initiative is expected to lead to improved efficiency in service delivery by making the authentication of both the ID card and its bearer at the point of service delivery more effective; enhance and ensure data credibility; avoid duplication of records on subscribers; minimise opportunities for abuse and fraud; and to promote cost-containment.
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Quelle/Source: BiztechAfrica, 10.05.2014
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