AMMAN — The Jordanian Medical Association (JMA) addressed some of the pushback that it has recently received from some Jordanian doctors because of the association’s agreement with Electronic Health Solution’s “Hakeem” program, which was concluded last week.
اضافة اعلان
The program was first launched with the aim of automating the public health sector. The recent agreement between JMA and Hakeem sought to include the private health sector, raising the anguish of some physicians. Key JMA members however have attempted to reassure doctors that Hakeem’s core mission is to modernize national medical health records.
The CEO of Electronic Health Solutions International Ghassan Lahham, told Jordan News that Hakeem is basically about automating the relation between all care providers and payers, mainly insurance companies, in addition to creating a lifetime health record for individuals. “This is a company for Jordanians, and it is partly owned by the Ministry of Health and the Jordanian Royal Medical Services, among other stakeholders. There is no ownership for one single person.”
One of the benefits of Hakeem, according to Lahham, is that it eliminates cases of fraud in the healthcare sector. The payers are insurance companies, and the providers are labs, pharmacies, hospitals, doctors and clinics, to name some. “We have 8 million active records from the public sector, and some of these records are from the Jordanian Army and the Armed Forces,” he said, noting that the request to integrate Hakeem’s system into the private sector was based on queries submitted by local insurance companies seeking automation to prevent fraud in the sector.
Additionally, automating the health sector has an advantage over the traditional ‘paper system’, because it is less costly, Lahham argued. “One of the insurance companies that I know actually spends around JD230,000 just on printing and distributing forms,” he said, adding that paper files will inevitably after many years take up space and additional costs.
Some doctors expressed concern to the JMA regarding the privacy of patients’ medical information on Hakeem, to which Lahham assured that the automated system provides “even more privacy” because the system does not allow doctors to access patients’ information without their consent.
Acting president of the JMA Mohammad Tarawneh addressed another concern voiced by doctors, which is the tax issue, assuring no tax would be imposed on the use of the system.
“It is not one of the duties of the program to deal with such financial claims. Hakeem is not a financial program. Currently, insurance companies subtract a certain amount from the sum of money that is meant to be allocated for the physician, and before they deliver that sum to the physician, they provide the subtracted amount of money to the tax department,” Tarawaneh stated.
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