Assessment of Cost of Malaria Management in Private Health Facilities of Nation Wide Medical Insurance Ltd in Ghana

Abstract

Background: Every day, 720 children die of malaria which can be prevented or cured if presented early. The private health sector is a major institution in the response to treating malaria globally and nationally. In 2017, about 30% of health facilities were privately owned and contributed significantly to the management of malaria in Ghana. Given the importance of the private health sector to the malaria management, it is prudent to assess the cost of managing malaria in private health facilities Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional census for the 2018 fiscal year of the cost of managing malaria cases in private health facilities of Nationwide Medical Insurance in Ghana was employed in the study. The cost of illness approach was used to estimate the direct medical cost of managing malaria in private healthcare facilities of Nationwide Medical Insurance. Medical claims were retrieved from the NMI database. This was achieved through the extraction of medical claims using the SQL server to run a query for the entire 2018 fiscal year. The extracted SQL data was transferred into the 2013 excel spreadsheet. Descriptive analysis was used to estimate the median, mean and standard deviation of the cost of managing malaria in private health facilities of NMI. STATA was used for these analyses. Results: The average cost of managing malaria was estimated at GHS105.05 with a median of GHS 106.00. Administrative cost constituted about 52% of the cost profile with the investigation and medication cost taking 25% and 23% respectively. This is relatively high compared to other studies. Conclusion: The cost of managing malaria in private healthcare facilities of Nationwide Medical Insurance is high. The administrative cost was identified to be the main cost driver of malaria management in private health facilities constituting more than half of the total cost of malaria management.