Oswald Essuah-Mensah, Deputy Director, Corporate Affairs Directorate, National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), said the new mobile renewal system for clients would help reduce fraud in operations of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

The NHIS mobile renewal gives opportunity to clients of the Scheme to renew their membership through mobile phone, by using an application to generate a code and pay through mobile money.

Addressing the press and stakeholders on the new NHIS mobile renewal in Ho, Mr. Essuah-Mensah said the innovation would address situations where some service providers defrauded the Scheme by requesting for claims on behalf of subscribers who had not visited health facilities within the period.

He said the mobile renewal system would also take away administrative bottlenecks and ease human traffic at the NHIS offices.

Mr Essuah-Mensah said the mobile technology, which uses the code *929#, would take away transportation cost for clients, attract new members and help improve coverage from 37 per cent to 100 per cent towards universal health coverage by 2030.

He said as part of steps to fight fraud, the Scheme had put in a system called Claims Check Code (CCC) where a subscriber would be asked to indicate whether he or she had visited a health facility for medical care with the response sent to NHIA headquarters for verification of claims by service providers.

Mr. Essuah-Mensah said though 18 million people registered on the Scheme only 10.58 million members were active as at 2017 and expressed the hope that the mobile renewal system would change the narrative.

Earlier, during a courtesy call on Dr Archibald Yao Letsa, Volta Regional Minister, the Deputy Director of Corporate Affairs, said clients could use Ghana card or the NHIS card to renew their membership or check the expiration of their membership.

He said the system had been piloted successfully and that the NHIA was using mass awareness campaign for its smooth operation after the official launch tomorrow, December 19, 2018.