Circular 12 of 2021: COVID Financial Reporting
For 2021, the Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) requires schemes to submit information that is cumulative from the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, all 2020 information submitted thus far must be contained in the 2021 submission.
This Circular refers to Circulars 54 of 2020 and 11 of 2021 regarding the reporting of COVID related financial information by schemes.
The initial COVID Financial Reporting template in an excel format was a requirement as per Circular 54 of 2020, and submitted via email. For 2021, the Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) requires schemes to submit information that is cumulative from the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Therefore, all 2020 information submitted thus far must be contained in the 2021 submission. For example, if a scheme had 200 COVID-19 infections for the whole of 2020 (January to December), and 50 new infections for January 2021 alone, the scheme should report 250 as total infections as of January 2021.
In order to streamline the collection of all COVID related data, the financial component is now included with the utilisation data in the COVID Data Collection System as communicated in Circular 11 of 2021.
As a transitional arrangement, the CMS will still require schemes to submit the reporting template on email in addition to the new system submission for a period of two months (January 2021 and February 2021.
The excel template has been updated to include fields for vaccine spend and is available on this link:
COVID Financial Reporting Template 2021
Schemes must continue to use the existing email address for the excel template: covidreports@medicalschemes.co.za
Timelines and submission details:
- Schemes are required to submit the financial data on a monthly basis, with the applicable month due at the end of the subsequent month e.g. January 2021 results are due by 28 February 2021.
- Each month’s data is captured as cumulative, since the start of the pandemic. The template includes validation messages as an initial error-checking guide.
Download the Circular here.