A Few Words
About our NHN
National Hospital Network (NHN) was founded in 1996 with the prime objective of bringing together leading independently owned private hospitals and medical facilities under one umbrella; to gain synergy and cost effectiveness, and to collaborate on best practice patient care.
NHN hospitals are consistently ranked among the top 20 in South Africa on the Discovery Health Patient Experience Survey (PaSS) rankings, yet the group’s members are continually striving to improve. Our quest for excellence in both medical services and patient care ensures that you can expect state of the art facilities and 5-star patient care at NHN member facilities.
Compassionate care, exceptional outcomes.
NHN's extensive network spans major urban areas like Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town, as well as smaller centers, ensuring accessibility to quality care. With a focus on BEEE compliance, NHN drives transformation in private healthcare. Beyond cutting-edge medical treatment, NHN prioritizes compassion and support for patients' holistic wellness. Our 'full circle' approach delivers advanced care in a comfortable environment, earning top ratings for patient-focused service. From leading practitioners to dedicated staff, NHN is committed to your comfort and recovery.
More About NHN
The NHN understands that medical schemes and medical scheme administrators tend to consider measurables such as quality and efficiencies of NHN members in deciding, inter alia, network appointments, it important for the NHN to ensure competitiveness by assisting members to render services at acceptable standards. The above interventions accordingly support the objectives of the exemption as benchmarking is one of the tools used to achieve the service-delivery requirements of medical schemes and medical scheme administrators.
The NHN has made significant strides in achieving progress on non-price factors under the exemption such as, inter alia, quality of service, efficiency of operations, product information, and access to the market.
The NHN has, at its own cost and at no charge to its members, enabled the generation of reports which members may directly access.
The gains achieved include:
- Implementation of the monthly Hospital Claims Rejection Report which gives member facilities detailed information on claims rejected by medical schemes and medical scheme administrators. The Claims Rejection Report allows members to rectify their claims for reprocessing as well as refine their submission processes to prevent claim rejections in future.
- The NHN implementing the monthly Hospital Generic Utilisation Report which gives NHN member facilities detailed information on the utilization of ‘generic’ drugs as contra-distinguished from the ‘original’ alternative. The utilization of the original product is shown along with the generic alternatives available and the potential cost saving that can be achieved by substituting the original product with the generic alternative. The Hospital Generic Utilisation Report creates awareness where costs can be reduced through generic substitution as to benefit both medical schemes and consumers in a Fee-for-Service environment. Naturally, this enhances the profitability of the facility in a Fixed-Fee environment.
- The implementation of the Hospital Fixed Fee Report gives NHN facilities detailed information on the Fixed Fees generated at a given period, as well as the profit or loss attained against the Fee for Service alternative. Facilities are further provided with a detailed analysis to assist in identifying areas of the Fixed Fees where cost savings can be affected.
- Members having the ability to access the NHN Hospital Efficiency Report which provides detailed information on the services rendered and billed for a given period in a facility. An analysis is performed for several key cost- efficiency and quality metrics and benchmarked against the NHN membership. By creating awareness of where the facility deviates from the norm, the NHN is providing the facility with information which, if acted upon, would probably improve their cost-efficiencies.
Without the intervention and support of the NHN:
- The independent NHN members would not have the skills to provide such analysis and critical input. Individually generating the reports would hardly be worth pursuing as it comes at a great expense. The 3 (three) large hospital groups do not suffer from this disadvantage and use similar information to strengthen and advance their positions.
- The scarcity of the resources required to extract this information suggests that the resources made available by the NHN to its members are not cheap. The skills required are beyond the means and reach of the average NHN facility. In fact, within the 3 (three) large hospital groups, the economies of scale enable these resources to be employed for the greater good and betterment of all their facilities. It would be punitive and economically unsound to expect the NHN facilities to acquire the expertise on an individual basis.
- The actuarial and switching expertise would not be within the financial reach of the average NHN facility. Even if they were, it would be difficult to secure a measure against which the outcomes would be benchmarked as it would be a single facility. The switching of claims through a dedicated switch provides an important mechanism for critical self-reflection on the cost of the services provided by a facility and a means to review such costs to become more cost-effective.
Without the intervention and support of the NHN:
- The independent NHN members would not have the skills to provide such analysis and critical input. Individually generating the reports would hardly be worth pursuing as it comes at a great expense. The 3 (three) large hospital groups do not suffer from this disadvantage and use similar information to strengthen and advance their positions.
- The scarcity of the resources required to extract this information suggests that the resources made available by the NHN to its members are not cheap. The skills required are beyond the means and reach of the average NHN facility. In fact, within the 3 (three) large hospital groups, the economies of scale enable these resources to be employed for the greater good and betterment of all their facilities. It would be punitive and economically unsound to expect the NHN facilities to acquire the expertise on an individual basis.
- The actuarial and switching expertise would not be within the financial reach of the average NHN facility. Even if they were, it would be difficult to secure a measure against which the outcomes would be benchmarked as it would be a single facility. The switching of claims through a dedicated switch provides an important mechanism for critical self-reflection on the cost of the services provided by a facility and a means to review such costs to become more cost-effective.
Very recently, the NHN made further strides towards improving non-price factors with the launch of the NHN Dashboard on 23 July 2021. The NHN Dashboard is a new tool which has been carefully crafted to include information that is very beneficial to NHN Members, both in the assessment of quality and cost of care and generates reports of:
- Key schemes and administrators.
- Group level results delineated by hospital.
- Claims metrics including number of admissions and cost per admission which comprise cost buckets and cost drivers such as tariffs, surgicals, ethicals, length of stay, level of care, theatre, etc.
- Quality metrics including admission rates, deaths, pressure ulcers, surgical site infections, surgical site infections, post-surgical venous thrombosis, falls, neonatal injuries, wrong site surgery, retained objects, etc.
- Hospital Efficiency Metrics and benchmarking.
- Contractual obligations to demonstrate monitoring.
On 20 July 2022 the NHN launched its NHN Quality Management Program which empowers its members towards identifying key areas of quality improvement. This will be critical in enabling NHN members engaging in the complex value-based contracting, encouraged by the HMI. The NHN Board formally adopted the NHN Quality Charter in July 2023.
It is through these interventions that most NHN members who ordinarily lacked comparative resources can increase efficiencies and quality of the services that medical schemes and administrators require from service providers.
I welcome you to engage with this directory and allow the information to offer you a glimpse into the expertise, technology, infrastructure, and leading-edge services available at our hospitals.
Neil Nair
NHN CEO