The National Health Insurance capitation scheme has chalked significant strides after a year of piloting in the Ashanti Region. It includes the enrolment of a total of 1,817,648 as against 1,750,000 before its onset. Mr Bawa Nurudeen, the Acting Ashanti Regional Manager of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), said currently, 44 facilities belonging to the Christian Health Association Ghana (CHAG), 195 Ghana Health Service facilities, 164 private hospitals and two quasi health facilities, which are the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and AngloGold Ashanti Hospitals, have registered with the scheme. He said the NHIA, in collaboration with the Department of Social Welfare, will also register 176,593 LEAP beneficiaries in the region unto the scheme for free and to provide the poor with an unimpeded access to quality health care. Added to this, he noted that the pilot scheme can boast of having checked abuses by clients who hop from one hospital to the other with the same ailments. Mr. Nurudeen, also speaking to the Ghana News Agency in Kumasi on Monday, said the scheme has also succeeded in bringing clients closer to the health care giver, who now spends quality time to interact with clients and educate them on preventive health care, leading to improvement in health care delivery. The Acting Regional Manager said plans were afoot to increase enrolment of the scheme by five per cent by the close of the year and to help achieve this pragmatic measures were being put in place to sensitize the public. He said one of the major challenges confronting the scheme in the region was non-renewal of cards by holders, some of whom wait till they get sick before they rush to renew them. This he said leads to inconvenience to both the scheme and the clients as well. On the payment of claims to service providers, Mr Nurudeen said a total GhC 85,140,578.84 was paid between January to December 2012. This year’s total of GhC 19,760,497.49 has been paid to cover January and February bills. Mr Nurudeen said everything possible was being done to ensure early payment of claims to the service providers but said the major challenge confronting them was faulty documents from the service providers, which sometimes slows down efforts at making payments to them. The Regional Manager was not happy with the low rate at which people renew their expired cards and urged them to renew them instead of registering as fresh members.