Seven hundred thousand people have been signed onto the Biometric Membership System (BMS) of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in the Greater Accra Region.
Most of them are pregnant women, children, the youth and the aged.
They are part of the 1.5 million subscribers expected to sign onto the scheme by the end of the year.
The exercise, which started in January this year, is meant to replace the manual type of registration of subscribers, and to help register more people.
High patronage
Addressing participants in the BMS review meeting in Accra, the Greater Accra Regional Director of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Mr Lawrence Amartey, said the introduction of the BMS had led to a high patronage of the NHIS by subscribers.
“Now, whenever an individual registers, he or she receives the ID card instantly, encouraging a lot of people to patronise the scheme,” he said.
Managers of the various district offices in the region also made powerpoint presentations of their operations as far as the BMS was concerned.
Rollout programmes for vulnerable groups
Mr Amartey indicated that the regional office would roll out programmes by next week, aimed at registering prison and psychiatric inmates, as well as vulnerable groups.
Utilisation and renewal of cards, he added, were also high, urging those who were yet to sign onto the scheme to make the effort to do so.
Mr Amartey also called on health personnel at the various facilities in the region to treat those with NHIS cards with dignity, adding that without them the authority could not exist.
On challenge that the NHIA faced, he stated that staff of the authority were usually exposed to various health hazards like skin rashes because they were usually in direct contact with subscribers during the registration process.
However, he said they had been advised to protect themselves adequately before handling subscribers who were sick to avoid infections.
The Membership Provider Relations Officer, Mr Collins Akuamoah, said the registration of the vulnerable was a mandate of NHIA, and could not be ruled out for any reason.
According to him, registering such people would give them automatic access to health facilities whenever they were sick.
