Ghana’s National Health Insurance Authority set to verify claims with biometrics

The National Health Insurance Authority in Ghana is set to begin verifying claims from service providers through a new biometric system.

Reported in My Joy Online, the system will capture the biometric data of NHIA cardholders and will generate a claim code when cardholders visit health facilities for insurance subscribers.

According to the report, this decision to introduce biometrics comes as an attempt to reduce fraudulent claims filed by service providers. Under the new process, health facilities that don’t process claims through the new biometric system will not be paid for its claims.

At this point it is unclear what kind of biometric system will be used for verification.

Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, Ghana is a hotbed for biometric system deployments, though not all have been entirely successful. Last year, the country successfully completed an election using biometric verification devices, though not without problems or contest. 

That being said, following its election, by having registered and verified approximately 13 million people for an election within 48 hours, Ghana broke the world record previously held by India for 3.5 million people.  

There have also been reports to suggest the country’s passport office is having trouble managing the large number of applicants for the country’s new biometric passport. 

Introduced over one year ago, Ghanaweb reports that this situation is due to the lack of functional interconnectivity from the main data center to the entire operational centers across the country and as a result, applicants end up having their data sent to the wrong office. This in turn, forces applicants to travel from region to region on the hunt for their own processed data.

Article Topics

biometric database  |  fraud  |  healthcare  |  verification