The Anti-Red Tape Authority (ARTA) has tapped the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to team up with the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) to address its connectivity problems.
The move will help PhilHealth address its backlog of pending applications for reimbursements of COVID-19 related claims from various hospitals.
In a meeting on Thursday, August 12, PhilHealth Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Arturo Alcantara said subscribing to another internet provider would help them continue working if the one they are currently using breaks down.
Alcantara also complained of the corporation’s low cloud storage.
DICT Undersecretary for Emerging Technologies Ali Atienza pledged to assist PhilHealth with its connectivity problems.
Apart from its IT problems, PhilHealth also cited the pandemic as one of its reasons for the delays in their processing of claims, which they aim to address by mobilizing more staff.
Private stakeholders, who participated in the meeting, asked ARTA and PhilHealth to look more deeply into the reasons for the bottlenecks.
Secretary Jeremiah Belgica, ARTA Director General, advised PhilHealth officials to be aggressive in finding solutions for their concerns to improve their services quicker.
“Kailangan matapos natin yung backlogs natin. Medyo madami, nakita ko kanina, ang dami pala,” he said.
“We’re all here to find solutions and fight this together so we can solve this in the quickest way possible,” he added.
PhilHealth is set to present the streamlined process of the Pre-Payment Medical Evaluation, including all the requirements, in its next meetings with ARTA.
In August 2020, the Senate prepared to launch an investigation on PhilHealth’s unpaid claims as reported by the Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines (PHAP). According to the report, of the P28-billion worth of unpaid claims, which covers the period of March to December 2020 from about 700 hospitals, only P6.3 billion was released.
PhilHealth claimed that the P6.3 billion was released through a debit-credit card method to hospitals in COVID-19 critical areas as identified by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID). The agency also claimed that the discrepancy between the paid and unreleased claims may be caused by differences in the accounting treatments.
Early this August 2021, the Authority received complaints from private hospitals who are having difficulty in securing their COVID-19-related claims from PhilHealth.
Another meeting between ARTA, PhilHealth, and Commission on Audit officials will be held in the coming days. (ARTA) – rir
