BLUE CROSS of Jamaica, the largest health insurance provider here, has officially implemented its new electronic card-swiping system, although most of the country's health professionals are still resisting this computerised payment system.
"We cannot wait until the negotiations are finished, we have a business to run. Suppose they drag their feet indefinitely? We can't sit down and wait on them," the company's vice-president for information systems, Victor Anderson, told The Gleaner yesterday.
Both Dr. Winston Dawes, Medical Association of Jamaica's (MAJs) president and Dr. William Lockyer, vice-president of the Association of General Practitioners, were not aware of the official implementation of the new system. They said that a team of health professionals is still in negotiation with Blue Cross to iron out kinks and that most health providers have not installed the necessary machine and computer to swipe the new health card.
The card-swiping system, the Provider Access System (PAS), that will eventually replace the current paper card system, Mr. Anderson said, was officially introduced on April 17. With 1,100 health providers islandwide (that is, doctors, dentists, pharmacists, laboratories and so on), he said that 50 of them have already signed on to the new system.
In spite of the reluctance of most health professionals to use the new system, Mr. Anderson said that Blue Cross has agreed in principle with the team negotiating on their behalf that any benefit that might come out of the negotiations will be made available to all health providers.
Representatives of the Association of General Practi-tioners of Jamaica, pharmacy owners, the Pharmaceutical Society of Jamaica, X-ray service providers, laboratory service providers and the Jamaica Optometric Association met with Blue Cross in February to register their objections to the new system. They say that it will burden them with additional investment of more than $100,000 to install a computer and card-swiping machine.
They must also pay a licence fee on each renewal of the contract with Blue Cross and Advanced Integrated Systems (AIS), the suppliers of the computer software. Also, each time a patient pays a medical bill using the swipe card, the health professional will have to pay to AIS a 1.75 per cent processing or transaction fee.
"We will in fact be subsidising Blue Cross by purchasing the software and paying the transaction fee, when we are offering Blue Cross the credit and there is no guarantee that we will not have to wait three or four weeks for payment," Dr. Dawes said yesterday.
