Doctors urged to shun medical scheme fee bundles
The Health Professions Council urges healthcare professionals not to buy into the global fee model, saying it ‘creates incentives for under-servicing’
The Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) has urged healthcare professionals not to sign agreements with medical schemes that bundle the money available for procedures such as hip replacements into a global fee, citing concerns over patient safety and doctors’ autonomy. If the HPCSA’s call is heeded by its members, it would throw a further spanner in the works for medical schemes that want to introduce global fee arrangements to contain costs. SA’s biggest open medical scheme, Discovery Health Medical Scheme (DHMS), already had to delay its plans to introduce global fees for hip and knee replacements in a network of arthroplasty centres on April 1 over concerns expressed by the South African Society of Anaesthesiologists (SASA) and other specialists. Global fee reimbursement models provide a single payment to a healthcare team to cover all the tests, procedures, drugs, devices and rehabilitation needed for a patient’s condition — a vastly different approach to the current fee-for...
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