One of the leading national Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) in Nigeria, Novo Health Africa has launched a new solution, named Novo Apoyo, to enhance enrollees’ healthcare experience.

The support-service initiative is accessible through its Ijele platform and is expected to drastically reduce challenges in accessing care, particularly wait time by up to 90 percent, amongst other benefits.

Speaking during the launch of Novo Apoyo, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Novo Health Africa, Dr. Dorothy Jeff-Nnamani, highlighted the major challenges users experience when accessing healthcare and explained the reasons behind the intervention.

Furthermore, the solution is expected to create a seamless avenue for interaction between clients and HR partners. Through Novo Apoyo, customers are given real-time, practical end-to-end support at the point of access. This minimizes uncertainty and guarantees hitch-free hospital visits.

The company’s Legal Manager, Nnenna Nwahiri, who represented Dr. Dorothy Jeff-Nnamani stated: “We acknowledge the challenges of delay in accessing care in the healthcare sector, impacting patient satisfaction and timely care. That is why Novo Apoyo has been optimised to reduce wait times, eliminate the inconvenience of unforeseen out-of-pocket payments, ensure patients receive needed prescriptions, address the risk of errors in hospital records and most of all empower the enrollee for better health outcomes. 

“In addition, our partner providers are relieved of administrative service bottlenecks ensuring that they concentrate on their primary role of diagnosing and treatment.

“The real-time self-check-in is a breakthrough transformation and the first of its kind in our industry. Its introduction signifies our commitment to transforming healthcare standards and driving positive change within the industry, thus showcasing our dedication to improving healthcare accessibility for Nigerians.”

She added: “As one of the pioneers in the HMO space, Novo has in the time past introduced different applications that try to help their enrollees at the point of accessing care.

“One of our core values is to ensure that most of the time when we receive complaints from our enrolees we try to find solutions to those challenges. Most of those challenges have to do with the time they get to wait at the hospital trying to get verification from providers at the point of accessing care.

“We, therefore, introduced a solution to addressing this challenge, which led to the introduction of Novo Health Apoyo. Introducing this product takes the power from the provider and gives it to the enrolees because if they are able to do this themselves, it helps to reduce the time they wait at the hospital.”

In his contribution, the company’s Head of Operations, Temidayo Kaffo, said that the team is very passionate about getting feedback from their clients and one of the outstanding feedbacks gotten from their survey was the delay in access to service.

“Another thing is feedback on irregularity. On our application, we have a section where enrollees can send us feedback. Now, one of the feedback was that they were seeing strange verifications on their profile. We conducted an investigation around this and we launched Novo Apoyo to address that.”

He said enrollees do not require additional costs to benefit from the solution.

“Novo Health Africa continues to set precedence in the healthcare industry by demonstrating its innovative and forward-thinking approach towards improving accessibility to quality healthcare for Nigerians.

“Novo Health Africa is a leading HMO dedicated to providing exceptional healthcare services throughout Nigeria. As an accredited provider by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Novo Health Africa offers comprehensive healthcare delivery solutions along the continuum of care.”