NHIF chief executive officer Geoffrey Mwangi. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Summary
- Patients, who had planned to settle their bills using NHIF cards, were forced to make cash payments or wait until the system became operational later in the afternoon.
- Cashiers and account officers working in some of the top NHIF registered hospitals said the occasional outage started last week before climaxing into a full-blown system failure Wednesday.
- NHIF contributors who visited the agency's offices were left for hours without any explanation of the outage even as they were subjected to manual settlement.
- Kenya’s biggest referral hospital Kenyatta, which hosts an NHIF payments office, was able to manually clear its patients.
Patients using National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) cards to
access health services and clear hospital bills were Wednesday left
stranded following a system outage that lasted hours.
Thousands
of patients, who had planned to settle their bills using NHIF cards,
were forced to make cash payments or wait until the system became
operational later in the afternoon.
It was not
immediately clear what caused the outage and the Business Daily’s effort
to reach NHIF chief executive officer Geoffrey Mwangi for an official
statement went unanswered.
Cashiers and account
officers working in some of the top NHIF registered hospitals said the
occasional outage started last week before climaxing into a full-blown
system failure Wednesday.
NHIF contributors who visited the agency's offices were left for
hours without any explanation of the outage even as they were subjected
to manual settlement.
The outage caused long queues
and massive delays in treatment centres to the chagrin of its members. A
principal NHIF card holder, who went to pick his wife from Nairobi’s
Coptic Hospital in the morning was kept waiting for hours and only
managed to discharge his patient in the late afternoon after waiting for
more than five hours.
“I have an NHIF card but the
system is down. I am disappointed that I contribute every month without
fail but in return this is what I get. The cashier has suggested that I
wait or pay cash. I get deducted every month, I will keep waiting until
it works,” he said.
Kenya’s biggest referral hospital Kenyatta, which hosts an NHIF payments office, was able to manually clear its patients.
“Unlike
most hospitals we have an NHIF office here and the payments are being
processed manually. The NHIF office manager has informed me that from
our end we are handling the situation and those making payments are
getting the help they need,” corporate affairs and communications
manager Simon Ithai said.
The NHIF scheme, which is
open to any Kenyan over the age of 18 with a monthly income of over
Sh1,000, has reached national coverage of about 25 million people,
including contributors’ dependents.
Three
years ago, NHIF increased workers contributions from Sh320 to a
graduated scale of between Sh500 and Sh1,700 per month based on each
worker’s monthly pay.
The higher fees came with
introduction of outpatient cover for contributors and enhanced benefits
for specialised treatment such as cancer and kidney dialysis.
In
the six months to December, for instance, NHIF collected Sh23.6 billion
from the seven million members and paid out Sh17.3 billion in claims.
Operational expenses consumed Sh3.2 billion, leaving the fund with a Sh3.1 billion half-year surplus.
Insurance
brokerage firm AON Minet Kenya said in a recent report that Kenya’s
medical inflation stood higher at 12 per cent last year, above the
general cost of living measure that averaged eight per cent in 2017.
The
study attributed the higher healthcare inflation to a rise in lifestyle
diseases and the ever climbing cost of imported medical equipment.
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