The Membership Mobile Renewal Service introduced by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) in 2019 is witnessing a tremendous performance in the northern region.
The Northern Regional Director of the NHIA, Mr. Issahaque Abdul Latif disclosed that about 301, 485 people renewed their NHIA membership cards using the service as at the end of 2020.
The figure according to him is an increased number from 253, 154 in 2019 when the intervention was first implemented across the country.
The NHIA introduced the technology to curb the inconveniences clients always go through to renew their cards and flooding the district offices of the authority in queues sometimes for days.
Speaking to THE CUSTODIAN on the sidelines of the Northern Region 2020 End of Year Review Meeting on Thursday (27 May, 2021), Mr. Abdul Latif stated about 70 percent of the revenue accrued in the past year was generated through the mobile renewal service.
“The fact of the matter is that, previously, we were not getting so much because the people will not just come to the office to pay and our previous targets were below one million Ghana cedis and that was with the now Savannah and North East regions together in the previous northern region.
The figure last year implies that 71 percent of people who renewed their cards used the membership mobile renewal platform. To put it more bluntly, over 301, 000 people will have trooped to our offices to renew their membership, but for the introduction of the mobile renewal platform” he added.
Meanwhile, the northern region current NHIS active membership is 964, 800 which is about 97 percent achievement of a target number of 996, 113 following the regional reorganization and the subsequent creation of the North East and Savannah regions from the northern region.
However, the NHIA Regional Director said the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in 2020 affected the operations of the authority resulting in their inability to meet a one hundred percent target set for the year.
“NHIA is an institution that gives target, we just don’t work, so we look at the population of the country and we give a target on the population. The 2020 estimated population for the current northern region was about 1, 811, 115 and the target was set at 50 percent, so 50 percent of 1.8 million would give over 900, 000.
What this means is that by the end of the year 2020, half of the citizens or population of northern region should be enrolled on NHIS and secondly their cards should be active, so, gladly we want to report that we were able to achieve 97 percent meaning we missed our target of 100 percent with just 3 margins” he explained.
