Determinants of nonrenewal of National Health Insurance (NHI) membership cards among healthcare workers in the Kintampo North Municipality, Bono East Region of Ghana

Introduction: National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was implemented in Ghana in 2004 to serve as the lifeline to realizing Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Available evidence suggests that, formal sector workers do not promptly renew their expired NHIS membership cards. This study was therefore conducted to unearth factors responsible for the failure of healthcare workers in the Kintampo North Municipality to promptly renew their health insurance membership whenever it expires. Methods: a descriptive cross-sectional design was used to conduct this study, where three hundred and ninety-seven (397) participants were recruited using a proportionate stratified sampling technique. All variables with a p-value <0.25 at the bivariate analysis level were selected and put into multiple logistic regression analysis models for statistical significance (p-value < 0.05). Odds ratios with their corresponding 95% Confidence Interval were reported. A p-value < 0.05 was set as level of significance. Results: almost all the respondents (94.0%) had NHIS membership cards; out of which 70.7% had valid membership cards. Fourty percent did not renew their expired NHIS membership cards for more than 7 months. From the study, reasons given for health workers´ inability to promptly renew NHIS membership included: 212 (19.8%) indicated forgetfulness, busy schedules 191 (17.9%), procrastination 167 (15.6%), self-medication 170 (15.9%) and utilization of spiritual homes (4.5%). All socio-economic factors were significantly associated at the bivariate level (p<0.05). However, in the multiple logistic regression model, employment status, the type of health staff and monthly salary lost their statistical significance. Conclusion: NHIS subscription and membership renewals are high among healthcare workers who participated in the study in Kintampo North District of the Bono East Region of Ghana. However, there is the need to encourage those who do not renew their expired cards by NHIA and its accredited facilities sensitizing the general populace on the utilization of mobile phones to renew NHIS membership cards in order to prevent long waiting time and bureaucracies in renewing NHIS cards. It will be prudent for NHIS to liaise with Government of Ghana (GoG) to put measures in place to facilitate automatic membership renewals for public sector workers who for some other reasons often fail to renew their cards.

Privacy Enhanced Healthcare Information Sharing System for Home-Based Care Environments / 대한의료정보학회지

OBJECTIVES: Home-based nursing care services have increased over the past decade. However, accountability and privacy issues as well as security concerns become more challenging during care provider visits. Because of the heterogeneous combination of mobile and stationary assistive medical care devices, conventional systems lack architectural consistency, which leads to inherent time delays and inaccuracies in sharing information. The goal of our study is to develop an architecture that meets the competing goals of accountability and privacy and enhances security in distributed home-based care systems. METHODS: We realized this by using a context-aware approach to manage access to remote data. Our architecture uses a public certification service for individuals, the Japanese Public Key Infrastructure and Health Informatics-PKI to identify and validate the attributes of medical personnel. Both PKI mechanisms are provided by using separate smart cards issued by the government. RESULTS: Context-awareness enables users to have appropriate data access in home-based nursing environments. Our architecture ensures that healthcare providers perform the needed home care services by accessing patient data online and recording transactions. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method aims to enhance healthcare data access and secure information delivery to preserve user's privacy. We implemented a prototype system and confirmed its feasibility by experimental evaluation. Our research can contribute to reducing patient neglect and wrongful treatment, and thus reduce health insurance costs by ensuring correct insurance claims. Our study can provide a baseline towards building distinctive intelligent treatment options to clinicians and serve as a model for home-based nursing care.