SOUTH Korea’s support in rolling out Bahrain’s national health insurance programme continues as the project moves to its implementation phase.
The Korean Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) is currently supporting the networking part of Sehati – Bahrain’s National Social Health Insurance System.
Sehati (My Health) launched in June 2017, in co-operation with HIRA, aims to reform Bahrain’s national health insurance system and prevent double payment on medicines and patient care.
South Korea’s Ambassador to Bahrain Hae Kwan Chung is delighted at the progress and believes it further outlines the healthy partnership between the two countries.
“We have many Korean companies in infrastructure and energy sectors – we have Samsung Engineering on the Bapco expansion project along with Italy and Spain, we have GS Engineering on the LNG project and on the IT sector, LG CNS is handling the operating system of Sijilat (Bahrain’s commercial registration system),” said Mr Chung.
“In the health sector, HIRA has worked with the Supreme Council for Health (SCH) in developing and installing Sehati and is still working on it.
“HIRA is also into maintenance and we hope to see the project fully rolled out and functional within three to five years,” he added as the GDN learned that the completed project is at the installation phase of networking the software with other relevant sectors.
Mr Chung
The GDN reported in July 2017 that a medical partnership between Bahrain and South Korea was aimed at helping to reduce the kingdom’s health expenditure.
Meanwhile, Mr Chung highlighted the stark similarities in the approaches adopted by Bahrain and South Korea in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, which he said were proving to be ‘successful’.
The envoy reiterated that Bahrain has been tackling the current health crisis through its ‘TTT strategy’, which had been adopted by his country too. TTT stands for Trace, Test and Treat, which according to studies is an effective strategy which tracks people infected and traces their contacts, helping to reduce the spread of the virus and in turn bringing its reproduction number (R0) below one. R0 is the average rate in which an infected person infects another.
“I’m happy to note that both Bahrain and South Korea adopted these measures and were always well prepared in terms of medical readiness.”
The envoy also praised Bahrain’s successful completion of its Phase Three trials for a potential Covid-19 vaccine. As many as 7,700 volunteers took part in the randomised trials of the vaccine developed by Chinese National Biotech Group, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical company Sinopharma.
“Both countries have also introduced the use of rapid test kits alongside PCR tests, which also marks the way forward,” he added.
South Korea registered 25,955 Covid-19 cases of which 23,905 recovered and 457 fatalities, while Bahrain hit 80,255 cases, 79,776 recoveries and more than 300 fatalities.
raji@gdn.com.bh
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