Nationwide Mutual Healthcare honours founders

The Nationwide Mutual Healthcare (NMH) on Saturday honoured its founding fathers at its Decennial Dinner and Awards Night in Accra for their foresight, vision, dedication and perseverance which led to its establishment.

The 10th anniversary celebration on the theme “A Decade of Private Health Insurance…The Success Story”, saw awards being given to founding fathers such as Dr Andre Badohu, Dr Edward Abbah-Foli, Mr. Harold Awuah-Darko, and the late Nana Ampem Awuah-Darko, the original visionary who was honoured posthumously.

Other individuals who contributed in diverse ways to the success of the organization were also honoured.

The NMH is Ghana’s premier private mutual health insurance company, which was promoted by the Society of Private Medical and Dental Practitioners in 2003, with a vision to be the dominant financier of healthcare services in the private medical sector.

Currently, it has corporate entities subscriber base of 480 and membership subscriber base of over 55,000 with an annual growth rate of 65 per cent.

Mrs. Nancy Ampah, NMH Chief Executive Officer, said the main purpose of the scheme is to efficiently collect and pool members’ contributions, provide quality healthcare to its members through a dependable network of motivated and committed healthcare service providers at the best possible value.

She said the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) is the best social and pro-poor intervention that had ever been implemented but the role of the private health insurance schemes was greatly underemphasized.

The CEO said: “We believe that by empowering and encouraging the private health insurance sector, those who can afford to pay for their healthcare would do so through the private health insurance and thereby liberating the scarce resources to enable government execute its social intervention for the poor.”

Mr. Anthony Sowah, NMH General Manager, said “From a very humble beginning in 2004, NMH has grown to be the undisputed market leader in private healthcare insurance industry in Ghana.”

He said the prospects of Nationwide for the future were even brighter, stating that the scheme had begun efforts to collaborate with healthcare providers who share in its philosophy and vision of delivering the best of healthcare to its members.

“To this end, the scheme will support such providers to develop their practices to offer top quality healthcare services comparable to any first-class service anywhere in the world.”

He said the scheme was also considering investing in information and communication technology infrastructure that would ensure automation of all claim submission and processing, coupled with electronic payment claims.

Mr Sowah explained that this was aimed at drastically reducing claim processing time and speed up claims payments to their service providers.

Mr Awuah-Darko said NMH had always been the pacesetter and would continue to lead the private health insurance industry to the next level.