Dar Es Salaam — THE National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF)will soon introduce bio-data smart cards for its members, a move likely to help the fund curb fraudulent acts among members.

Speaking soon after opening a one day seminar for photo journalists and cartoonists held in Dar es Salaam today, NHIF Director General, Mr Emmanuel Humba told the 'Daily News' that the introduction of smart cards will help to curb the problem of the fund customers sharing cards with other family members or neighbours.

He said that people have been lending their cards to others but since all the hospitals and health centres offering health insurance services will have machines to swap members smart cards, it will now be difficult for members to get the services.

"After realizing that there were a lot of frauds in accessing health insurance services, the Fund have to find ways of defeating high the incidence of fraudulent claims prevalent in the medical insurance fund," he said.

The new NHIF card will include contributors' bio-data to allow instant processing by electronic reading machines.

But even with the use of biometric card, the fund will have to find ways of dealing with cases where doctors collude with patients to inflate the medical bills and offer treatment for non-insured disease - then bill the health insurance fund, said Mr Humba.

"The solution to this is continuous public education to inform the users there is no gain in this being part of fraudulent claims," he added.

He said that the other major challenge facing the fund was unfaithfulness of service providers who are conducting unnecessary diagnostic procedures for patients, just to make sure that they harvest more money from the fund.

He said that the fund have established a fraud departments which deals with verifying all claims made by service providers whose claims are doubtful and that since its establishment, the department has uncovered a wave of fraudster service providers.

Mr Humba explained that during financial year 2009/10 the fund was expecting to register 113,760 new members but as of December, last year, it had only managed to register 41,005 new members.

He said that the fund will conduct a ward to ward awareness campaigns for the need to access health insurance fund and community health funds so that a majority of Tanzanians can benefit.