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Transnet medical aid back on trackTRANSMED Administrators, who administer Transmed Medical Fund, the country's largest corporate medical aid society, have brought about a sweeping transformation. Transmed Medical Fund provides medical cover to 150 000 Transnet employees and pensioners and ran at a significant deficit, funded by Transnet. This deficit was aggravated by the fact that administration costs at Transmed Administrators were 15% above the industry average. At the same time, the health industry was in the throes of a major legislative upheaval, while medical aid societies countrywide were adopting managed health care principles to cap runaway claims and improve the quality of medical services. Dr Penny Thlabi, previously a medical doctor, was appointed general manager of Transmed Administrators to push through programmes of business transformation and affirmative action. "We were given two years to reduce administration costs in line with the industry norm or face the prospect of having the administration handed over to the private sector," says Thlabi. The transformation at Transmed was swift and dramatic - and all the more impressive given the inefficiency and bureaucracy classically associated with state-owned or parastatal departments. The reforms spread confusion and distrust among members. The number of queries reaching Transmed Administrators increased 10-fold to 40 000 a day, along with a barrage of complaints about dropping service levels. The problem was essentially one of communication. Once the message was distilled to a few, comprehensible messages and broadly disseminated, the query rate returned to normal. Thlabi called in World Class International, an international consulting firm employing the principles expounded by Dick Schonberger, based on a study of Japanese and US companies in the 1980s. "The scope of our engagement was to re-engineer the processes to reduce costs and lead times and improve efficiencies and client service," says Greg Shankland, managing director of World Class International SA. "We found, for example, that it took 55 days to process claims on average prior to the re-engineering. Only 7.3 of these days were under the control of Transmed Administrators, the rest were the result of delays at the Post Office and from doctors submitting claims."
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