Diabetes covered by medical insurance in Dubai

Treatment for diabetes and pre-diabetes conditions will now be covered in your basic medical insurance, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) has announced.

This is a bid to ensure early detection and unified management of diabetic and pre-diabetes cases in the emirate.

“The implementation of the mandatory health insurance scheme provides us with unique opportunities to detect patients with chronic diseases and to use this data to gauge trends and device evidence-based policies to tackle it,” said Essa Al Maidoor, director-general of DHA.

“The cost of uncontrolled diabetes with complications is 25 times more than the cost of controlled diabetes. Therefore, there is no doubt that policies based on concrete data need to be introduced to tackle the prevalence and management of this disease.”

Al Maidoor added that the DHA will also implement this standard for other chronic diseases like irritable bowel syndrome, bronchial asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

In a bid to ensure that all healthcare providers in Dubai follow the same standards of diabetes management, the DHA in collaboration with Merck Serono will hold several training workshops for over 700 doctors.

Dr Mohammad Farghali, head of health insurance medical regulation, said, “The training will include eight sessions covering all aspects of screening and care for diabetics and pre-diabetics.”

Dr Haider Al Yousuf, director of health funding at the DHA said, “Using insurance to promote preventive screening and then standardising protocols in diabetes management will go a long way in managing the disease.”

He added, “Using international benchmarks and keeping local issues in mind, a DHA team of specialists have devised a set of criterions that all healthcare practitioners in Dubai will have to adhere to. The defined parameters of care include everything from screening to medications and diet. Several of the screening and care parameters are in line with UAE National Guidelines for Diabetes and factors such as diet have been modified to adapt to the regional needs.”

How this will benefit Dubai

The UAE has 740,000 diabetic patients and more than 900,000 undiagnosed cases of diabetes (data released in the 2014 International Diabetes Federation statistics).

In 2014, Dubai had an insured population of 1.9 million, of these 138,000 have type 2 diabetes and 7,000 have type 1 diabetes and Dh732 million was the cost of their diabetic treatment (data released by DHA’s e-claims data of the private health sector in Dubai).
 

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