MTN Nigeria, Salt & Einstein MTS and the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) have partnered to launch Y’ello Health, a mobile based universal health insurance service.
Aimed at mobile subscribers and given through health management organizations, Y’ello Health is a micro-insurance service aimed at giving Nigerians affordable health insurance cover on a pre-paid basis. Users will use their mobile phones to pay for and access prefered medical treatments.
According to Dr. Femi Thomas the executive secretary of NHIS: “MTN is a large player in the Nigerian economy, having a good number of registered Nigerians on its database. To be able to reach out to Nigerians, we at NHIS decided to partner with Salt & Einstein MTS and MTN on this new initiative to achieve “Universal Health Coverage” for Nigerians nationwide.”
Partnering with MTN Nigeria will hep the service reach out to a large number of people as the telco has over 50 million subscribers and the largest in the country. Mobile technology will play a great role as the country has ove 120 million subscribers which will now receive direct health insurance via their phones.
“MTN’s motivation to partner on the health insurance initiative with the Salt & Einstein MTS and NHIS, is driven by the firm’s passion to reduce exclusion and social disparities by supporting government’s vision of delivering health care for all as well as to make health care mobile by integrating it into the MTN broader digital strategy,” said MTN Sales & Distributions Executive, Omatsola Barrow.
The service is expected to assist patients visit hospitals at least twice monthly or up to 7 a year and get medical cover of up to N80,000.00 in a year. Patients will also have access to over 6000 hospitals from across the country fully registered with NHIS.