The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) says in a bid to strengthen its scheme and ease pressure during renewal of the card, has introduced a renewal mobile application named E-renewal to enable subscribers renew their NHIS cards without hustle at their various destination and pay the cost involved through mobile money wallet.

According to the Authority, the Mobile Membership Renewal Service when launched in December this year would enable members to renew their NHIS membership by paying their premium and fee via mobile money through the Short Code*929#.

Membership cards of those who choose to renew via mobile will not be embossed with the expiry dates whereas the mobile Renewal Service will also be available on all networks at charge of Ghc1 for all subscribers except pregnant women and Indigents who will be required to go through manual process for authentication purpose.

The Deputy Director of the Corporate Affairs Directorate of the Scheme, Oswald Mensah, who revealed this at a media briefing in Koforidua, the Eastern Regional capital said, under this system, the NHIA has planned to synchronize the scheme with the Ghana Card, whereby a subscriber may not be required to go through another bio-metric registration with the NHIA to become a member of the Scheme since that information will be tapped in the database of the National Identification Authority.

He said it has become necessary to reduce the stress on clients or beneficiaries endure any time they go to renew their NHIS cards.

Mr. Mensah expressed further that, ‘’subscribers will be required to validate their hospital attendance on their mobile phones as part of mechanism to check duplicate payment of claims and fraud’’.

The Deputy Director of the Corporate Affairs Directorate of the Scheme explained that, the move is part of innovative initiatives by current management of the Scheme to increase renewal and enrollment rate from current peak of 10.58 active memberships by 20% within a year, enhance customer experience by reducing renewal time by 95% and cost by subscribers.

He announced that, the programme has been piloted in two districts – West Mamprusi Municipality in the Northern Region and Asuogyaman District in the Eastern Region whereas the system is generated to manage all claims electronically and will also help to remove loopholes in the current system to sustain the scheme.

He further stated that. ‘’ it is an amalgamation of best practices from Germany, United Kingdom and the United States of America, added that, is also introducing other innovations such as e-receipts and e-claims

So far 18 million people have been enrolled unto the scheme as plans are far advanced by the scheme to introduce another application for the registration process since the number of subscribers keeps increasing.

The NHIA has also put in place enough measures and captured about 517 drugs under the scheme to make it efficient to help Ghana Achieve Universal Health care by 2030.