NHIS develops roadmap for e-service to achieve UHC – ES

Prof. Mohammed Sambo, Executive Secretary, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) says the scheme has developed a roadmap for e-NHIS to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

Sambo disclosed this when he visited the Managing Director of News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Mr Buki Ponle, in NAN Headquarters, Abuja.

He said NHIS was already working on a lot of reforms including the digitalisation of the system to enable Nigerians to easily access NHIS services.

“Before I came, several attempts were made to digitalise NHIS without success; but within the short period of my arrival, we were able to achieve the feat.

“We have been able to develop a roadmap and we have secured the approval of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) to digitalise our activities.

“We have secured the approval of FEC to transform the entire business process of NHIS and we are deep into the presentation of all the components of e-NHIS.

“With this transformation, we are saying Nigerians can be anywhere and they will be able to enrol for NHIS without stress in coming months.
“This is a great departure from manual process.”

He said NHIS had developed a framework for ‘Health Insurance under One Roof (HIUOR)’ by bringing all the State actors and stakeholders together for effective coordination.

The Executive Secretary, therefore, sought the support of NAN in the area of information dissemination on health insurance benefits to Nigerians and the reforms agenda of the scheme.

“We have been trying to come and meet NAN but we could not because of COVID-19.

“We know NAN is one of the most organised and reputable media organisations which is in charge of information, education and communication to the society.

“We apologise that we were unable to come earlier than now.
“We have packaged a lot of advocacy visits but because of COVID-19 and restriction of interaction, we decided to leave them.

“Now that we are beginning to live with (realities of) COVID-19, we felt that it is important that we quickly try to meet the obligation.

“To visit NAN; to inform the agency about the activities and transformation that is going on in NHIS.”

According to Sambo, NHIS activities are in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s next level agenda, hence the need to solicit media support to achieve the goal.

He noted that the President’s agenda of attaining health insurance for all Nigerians was in line with the global declaration of attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

“There is no way NHIS can achieve its mandate of making health insurance available for all without working closely with media, especially NAN, in the area of information dissemination and education of the people,” Sambo said.

In his response, Ponle said NAN was established in 1976 but went into operations in 1978 to ensure adequate responsible journalism.
“Ever since then, we have been on the rise.

“We started as a text message agency, but today, we can compete favourably with other agencies globally.

“There is nothing that they do that we cannot do or are even doing better; I am proud to say this.”

Ponle expressed the readiness of the agency to partner with NHIS to report its activities. (NAN)