Ministry of Health rolls out online claiming facility for pharmacies

Pharmacies can now submit subsidy claims electronically to the Ministry of Health instead of sending them on floppy disks fortnightly.

Alan Hesketh, Deputy Director-General, Information, said the new online service will be available to all registered pharmacies from December 2008.

"This is the first web-based service that uses the new approach for the Connected Health Information System," according to Mr Hesketh. Connected Health is an initiative aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of health payment processes across the sector through a secure and reliable interconnection network.

Eleven pharmacies are working with the Ministry of Health’s Information Directorate in the transition period and are already using the online claiming facility. About 350 registered Auckland Metro and Northland District Health Board pharmacies will be progressively brought online by mid-December.

“Just over half of the 93 million payments currently made by the Ministry’s Information Directorate relate to pharmacy claims. Having an online service improves the efficiency and security of processing these claims,” Mr Hesketh said.

Previously, pharmacies made payment claims manually by submitting claim details on floppy disks to the Ministry every fortnight and receiving paper-based returns. But there were often issues with corrupted disks, causing delays in the processing of claims.

The online facility has been developed in collaboration with the Pharmacy Guild, Auckland Metro District Health Boards and the
pharmacy management system vendors HealthSoft and Toniq.

“In the future, the online facility could also handle claims from a variety of providers such as laboratories, maternity services and dental care,” according to Mr Hesketh.

“Pharmacies will also have full access to other online capabilities such as validating a patient's national health index number via a look- up tool as well as future opportunities in electronic prescribing,” he added.