NHIF Building in Nairobi's Upperhill. FILE PHOTO | NMG
The NHIF has in recent years played a critical part in easing
the medical bills burden for poor Kenyans, but the fund still has a lot
to do in meeting Kenyans’ service delivery expectations.
Besides
long response delays for patients on National Hospital Insurance Fund
(NHIF) services that require pre-authorisation, the problem of system
downtimes is now becoming far too frequent. The fund, which is set for
conversion into a national social insurance fund, must live up to the
huge expectations that Kenyans have come to place on it.
It
is not acceptable that patients are forced to wait for hours either to
get hospital discharge or access treatment simply because computer
systems are down. NHIF must invest in redundancies and back-up systems
that can guarantee continuity of service in the inevitable events of
system outages.
The fund must also build a human face
for interaction with patients and its other stakeholders. To suffer a
system outage is bad enough, but failure to be transparent and
responsive to both patients and media queries whenever such downtimes
occur makes it even worse.
Being
a members-funded statutory scheme, the NHIF must shed the tag of yet
another lethargic State bureaucracy and cultivate the image of a
responsive, customer-centric organization.
The fact
that the fund has 25 million members largely thanks to its legal status
as a compulsory insurer for workers makes it even more important for it
to strive for delivery of user-friendly services.
As a
key agency charged with delivery of the Health Pillar under the
government’s “Big Four” agenda, NHIF will play a critical role in
enhancing access to health services for all.
The
government could equip all hospitals with the best machinery and doctors
but it is the patients’ ability to pay for services that will give them
access to medical care.
NHIF must therefore remodel itself as a modern, efficient, technology-driven insurer.
It
would help to, for example, benchmark with the UK’s National Health
Service which has for decades proven that it is possible to provide
affordable health coverage for all citizens.
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