By Hilda Afes
Since independence in 1960, Nigeria has had a very limited scope of legal coverage for health protection and safety, besides the over 90% of the Nigerian population being without health coverage.
Dr Hilda Afes
The health system in the country has been evolving over the years through health care reforms aimed at addressing public health challenges confronting its citizens but not much has been achieved in all these years due to poor policies and lack of effective and efficient initiatives.
Medical experts and private policy makers had also in the past blamed citizens for lack of commitment to enroll into public or private health scheme, but with limited coverage in the country, most Nigerians have little or no interest in such scheme. Besides, the willingness to save little percentage of their income to guarantee them access to medical services has been far bellow expectations when put face to face with the importance of personal health care.
It is for these reasons and to increase awareness of saving for health purposes and provide a more accessible means to emergency health services, that medical experts have continued to advocate for new advanced initiatives in health sector, such that would cost subscribers little to live healthy and save them in the case of accident emergency with a little technology that subscribers can carry about and could be use anywhere anytime.
In countries like the US for instance, little tech has taken the burden of limited health care access from the citizens because there is centralised data base that locates all subscribers through a sweep of their cards in any medical centre pay machine.
For instance, the new African health initiative, NITDOC Health Card, recently became one of the most brilliant and creative initiatives stemming out of the Health sector in Nigeria and Africa at Large, It is a medical initiative that synchronizes the tinancial and technical sector all in a card.
What this simple means is that subscribers or their loved ones don’t have to carry cash to the hospitals and pharmacies. It allows them to fund their cards with money from their atm card, receive or transfer units from their NITDOC card to another, for a healthier medical saving habit that could also be linked to their account for monthly or quarterly deductions and make use of the card at any hospital or Pharmaceuticals, once the card is swiped and your medical history is displayed.
Hilda Afes is a medical doctor and entrepreneur, she writes from Lagos.
