South African Deputy Health Minister Dr Molefi Sefularo has emphasised the importance of public private partnerships in the development of the National Health Insurance scheme (NHI).

Speaking at the recent Healthcare Funders conference, he said that the public and private sectors should share both experiences and technical expertise if the notion of universal coverage is to become a reality.

Work is currently underway on a national electronic patient records system in South Africa. The system is being developed by three consortia – the IBM Consortium, the Bophela Consortium, led by Siemens and the arivia.kom-Waymark Consortium. The system will be known as eHR.za and is part of the country’s health development plans, which includes the NHI.

The three consortiums have agreed to work together in developing the optimum solution, an example of how the Department of Health wants to develop the rest of its eHealth initiative.

"It is only through working together that we can create a health system that is truly world-class, offers our people adequate and reliable financial risk protection and access to affordable, acceptable and equitable health services through an integrated network of public and private providers and facilities that offer good quality care to all," Dr Sefularo said.

Emphasising the crucial role he believes the private sector plays in this process, Dr Sefularo made particular reference to the challenges the NHI will bring in terms of the management and administration of private health insurance schemes.

"It is necessary to ensure that the publicly administered and managed NHI fund is appropriately poised to gain from the experiences of the past and to learn how to best address the challenges that it may encounter, especially with regards to controlling costs escalation, managing and preventing fraud among other things," he said.

Dr Sefularo referred to the government’s responsibility in forming and managing a social safety net, ensuring every citizen has access to affordable, quality health services, free at the point of delivery and that this is what formed the basis for the proposal to implement the NHI, through which the majority of the country’s healthcare funds would flow.

"It is within this context that the present dominant role of medical schemes in health care funding needs to be reviewed, the current concentration of health care resources in one sector that benefits the few is not what we envisage.

"The proposed NHI model calls for key adjustments that have to be made in the national health system in relation to four equally important areas, namely the revenue collection and pooling of funds, purchasing of services and the provision of these services to the general public," said Dr Sefularo.

"Innovative mechanisms are being considered with regards to the processes of quality assurance and quality improvement systems to ensure that these two core elements become inculcated as routine processes that will help ensure sustained quality improvement and assurance in both the public and private health facilities," he concluded.