Private hospitals misusing 'Smart Card'

KOCHI: Some private hospitals have been found to be cornering funds under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bhima Yojana’s ‘Smart Card’ scheme through fraudulent methods. The ‘Smart Card’ project was launched with much hype for providing health insurance coverage.

The fraud begins with the fabrication of the medical reports of the patients with minor ailments. When a patient arrives at the hospital seeking medication for minor ailments like fever, the hospital authorities would  enter in the records that he or she had been suffering from major diseases like neurological disorders. This would enable the hospital authorities to grab money from this scheme.

District Collector P I Sheikh Pareeth, who is in-charge of the scheme in the district, has said that such anomalies have been reported.

"We have also taken measures to remove such hospitals from the list,’’he said.

The officials of the  Comprehensive Health Insurance Agency Kerala(CHIAK), the agency under the Labour Department which monitors the implementation of the scheme, also confirmed it.

"Some time ago, we found that a hospital was making money from this scheme by quoting high rate for minor ailments. The hospital reports showed neuro cases on the rise. But it proved to be wrong when we conducted an inspection,’’ sources with the CHIAK said.

Though the authorities claim that they are taking every possible steps to resolve the issue, it does not seem so.

Many patients who have approached the hospitals, including private and public, are unable to avail themselves of this service.

Recently when the CHIAK team inspected a private hospital at Aluva,it found that the latter’s claim  was wrong. Though the hospital claimed Rs 11 lakh, only Rs 1 lakh was due.

The monitoring systems at various levels are also porous. Some reports even showed 114 caesarians were conducted on males. This mistake occurred while registering the patients’ names and details.This points fingers at the monitoring agencies.