Background
allpay’s relationship with NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership began in December 2017, following a competitive tender process, in which allpay were successfully awarded the contract to provide a Prepaid Card service.
As part of the contract, NHS Wales utilise allpay’s Prepaid Card platform to disburse funds to eligible recipients for gluten free food purchases, giving choice and independence on their range of food and way of purchase. Previously, recipients of the gluten free food scheme would be required to:
- Visit their local GP to receive a prescription
- Wait more than 48 hours to collect the prescription
- Visit the local pharmacy to place Gluten Free product order
- Wait on average 1 – 2 weeks for delivery
Implementation
Prior to go-live, allpay supplied NHS Wales with a dedicated Regional Sales Manager (RSM) and Implementation administrator, as part of the ongoing account management and project teams – ensuring NHS Wales were implemented in line with their tender requirements. Following award, allpay’s RSM attended onsite and aided in the completion of NHS Wales’ Programme Overview document – detailing all programme requirements including services required, Merchant Category Codes (MCC) blocking, spend limits and ATM blocking. The MCC blocking was particularly important, as this allowed NHS Wales to reduce where the funds on the cards could be spent.
Gluten Free Food Purchases Scheme
Following a successful implementation, NHS Wales went live with allpay for an initial 6-month pilot in June 2018, utilising their Instant Issue Advanced product – enabling the disbursement of funds electronically via allpay’s Online Organisation Portal.
A personalised Prepaid Mastercard© – allowing Point-of-Sale, Online and Telephone payments.
- Funds immediately available once loaded and activated.
- Reloadable facility – allowing frequent loads for the NHS across the life span of the card.
- Online access to all administration functionality via the Organisation Portal.
- Variable choices of spend limits for the scheme.
As part of the allpay solution, the Online Organisation Portal enables NHS Wales to:
Disburse funds onto Prepaid Cards from their central funding account – this can be done individually or in bulk.
- Monitor transactions via the online reporting suite – ensuring spend is in line with the associated spending plan.
- Restrict places of purchase down to Supermarkets, pharmacies, bakeries and online supermarkets and pharmacies.
- Recover unspent funds – this can be done on individually or in bulk.
With the allpay Prepaid Card system in place, recipients now have access to their Gluten Free products much quicker and through a route of their choice, with the old process often taking from several days to several weeks days before the recipient could have access to their much-needed products. With an openness of selection, the new electronic Prepaid Card provides an extended amount of choice for product adoption, with old protocols limiting the products that recipients could access.
Alison Jones, Clinical Lead Medicines Management Dietitian, said:
“This mechanism of support has been greatly liked by patients with Coeliac disease compared to the previous prescription mechanism and is now offered to all with the disease across the health board. Participants have found the card easy to use, flexible and have mostly found that the logistics of managing the card has worked for them. Using the allpay platform to load and redeem funds and alter funds in real time has been very beneficial for us and for participants. Equally being able to run reports on spends for all the cards has been vital for us to understand how this scheme is working, both for participants and for the NHS. This method of support has been so successful that it is now to be offered to all people with Coeliac disease across Wales.”