More than 5.8 million subscribers (70 per cent) of the National Health Insurance Scheme, last year, renewed their membership through the Mobile Renewal System, boosting the renewal rate by 9.1 per cent.

This is the highest to be recorded since the introduction of the social intervention in 2003 as it offers ease and convenience to members to simply dial *929# on their mobile phones and pay with money from their mobile money wallets to stay active.

Mr Oswald Essuah-Mensah, the Deputy Director of Marketing, NHIA, who told the Ghana News Agency in an interview, on Thursday, said a total of 9.1 million renewed their membership in 2019.

He stated that the Mobile Renewal System also helped the Authority to mobilise huge sums of money with a text messaging feature, which assessed the claims of service providers to know how genuine their claims were and how to respond to them.

The Mobile Renewal System was introduced in December 2018.

Prior to this, Mr Essuah-Mensah said, a total of 8.3 million individual members had renewed their cards in that year.

Though the Scheme has more than 22 million registered members; only 12.2 million, representing about 42 per cent of the entire population, are active members.

“This is inadequate as the nation is striving to achieve universal health coverage,” he emphasised.

The interview was conducted, when Mr Essuah-Mensah led a delegation from the Authority to engage the Management of the Ghana News Agency at its headquarters, in Accra, on how to partner and promote the activities of the Authority.

This includes publishing information to enlighten the public on its developments, comprehensive services and benefits the Scheme provided.

The NHIA has also introduced a ‘Membership Handbook’ to serve as a guide to individuals who registered to access NHIS benefits.

“The Authority is ensuring that individuals who register receive the handbook and we also distribute some through community durbars so that our members can be abreast with our operations,” he said.

The handbook provides information on the NHIS benefits package; exclusions list; rights and responsibilities of members; how to register as a member and renew a membership; how to replace a membership card; offences; complaints resolution process, NHIS offices across the country, and frequently asked questions by members and NHIS medicines list.