ADVANTAGES OF OUTSOURCING TO HEALTHCARE BPO

Outsourcing is a concept people get fired up about. Some people love it; others hate it. It seems as though nothing divides a room full of business professionals faster than the idea of sending some services out of house.

Although some people will argue against it until they’re blue in the face, outsourcing is incredibly important for virtually every business today.

Outsourcing is the practice of using outside firms to handle work normally performed within a companyand is a familiar concept to many entrepreneurs. Small companies routinelyoutsource their payroll processing, accounting, distribution, and many otherimportant functions — often because they have no other choice. Many largecompanies turn to outsourcing to cut their costs. In response, entireindustries have evolved to serve companies’ outsourcing needs. But not manybusinesses thoroughly understand the benefits of outsourcing.

It’s true that outsourcing can save money, but that’s not the only reason to do it. Wise outsourcing can provide a number of long-term benefits.

Healthcare is one of the biggest industries in the world. The modern healthcare industry is divided into many sectors and depends on interdisciplinary teams of trained professionals and paraprofessionals to meet the health needs of individuals and populations. The main function of healthcare is diagnosing and treating patients and to achieve this, the primary goals that healthcare organizations focus on is maximizing staff efficiency and delivering excellent patient care. As the patient’s experience improves right from diagnosis to check-in to recovery and release, the patient is more confident to return or recommend the healthcare facility to friends or family members. But providing excellent patient care requires a lot of investment on resources and manpower. Moreover, staff members are asked to work in a wide range of areas which are out of their area of expertise. Healthcare organizations must make an effort to balance the number of non-care responsibilities a staff member can handle so that quality patient care can be provided. According to a research report, the global Healthcare BPO market is estimated to grow at a rate of 10.7% and reach US$188.9 billion in 2018. Ever since the Affordable Care Act was implemented, medical outsourcing forms a critical part of American Healthcare industry.

The healthcare sector lags behind other industries when it comes to considering outsourcing their non-core activities. The main reason behind this is the highly fragmented nature of the healthcare industry. For the flow of information across the value chain, this kind of fragmentation creates barriers. More overoutsourcing has never been considered part of healthcare operations. However, in recent years, outsourcing has played a major role in delivering quality patient care. This has resulted in more and more healthcare organizations increasingly relying on outsourcing.

Here are the Advantages of Outsourcing to Healthcare BPO

COST EFFECTIVE

Cost-cutting may not be the only reason to outsource, but it’s certainly a major factor. In anindustry as competitive as healthcare, the main aim of businesses is to look atways to reduce expenses and for many healthcare businesses outsourcing plays anintegral role in achieving this goal. Healthcare companies can save asignificant amount of money by outsourcing tasks which otherwise would have tobe carried out by hired additional in-house employees. Medical outsourcingpartners handle a large team of professionals on the behalf of the healthcarecompany thereby saving the company the cost of acquiring additional staff andtraining them.

The professional team of the outsourcing partner keep themselves updated with the latest changes in regulations and standards. Various healthcare companies consider outsourcing so as to realize cost savings and have better control over the cost of the outsourced function. Usually healthcare companies consider an outsourcing vendor who specializes in that outsourced function and performs it more efficiently than the company by the virtue of transaction volume.

Many businesses embrace outsourcing as a way to realize cost savings or better cost control over the outsourced function. Outsourcing converts fixed costs into variable costs, releases capital for investment elsewhere in your business, and allows you to avoid large expenditures in the early stages of your business. The most important benefit is that outsourcing of work allows one to get the work done at a very low cost and in a much more efficient way. There is a vast difference in the wage patterns of the western developed countries and the developing companies. The kind of work which is done in the west for a very high price can be obtained at a much cheaper rate in the developing countries and the difference varies to up to 60%. Offshore outsourcing allows the organization to obtain high quality services at a low operational cost.

AVAILABILITY OF SKILLED PROFESSIONALS

Companies that do everything themselves have much higher research, development, sales & marketing, and distribution expenses, all of which must be passed on to customers. Outsourcing the business functions and working with an outside provider’s cost structure and economy of scale can give your firm an important competitive advantage. One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing is the large availability of skilled healthcare professionals who have tremendous amount of expertise and experience in carrying out specific tasks and are ready to take on a job of any complexity and size at a short notice. The availability of skilled medical professionals with the medical outsourcing company ensures that the client’s requirements are taken care of in the best possible manner without any administrative hassles. It even saves the healthcare company a lot of paperwork and tedious labor of employee acquisition and retention as all of this will be handled by the outsourcing partner.

FOCUS ON PATIENT CARE

Every business has limited resources, and every manager has limited time and attention. Outsourcing can free the entrepreneur from tedious and time-consuming tasks, such as payroll, so that he or she can concentrate on the marketing and sales activities that are most essential to the firm’s long-term growth and prosperity. Outsourcing can help your business to shift its focus from peripheral activities towards work that serves the customer, and it can help managers set their priorities more clearly. The main reason for companies to outsource is to eliminate any distractions and help them concentrate on their core competencies. For healthcare companies,medical outsourcing can be a lifesaver as they can lessen the tedious job of managing administrative functions and managing workload and realign their focus on providing quality patient care. This results in improvement in the standards of healthcare across the company and simultaneously increases the quality of patient care. With increased positive experience for the patients, the goodwill for the healthcare organization increases.

MINIMUM ERRORS AND RISKS

While growth is usually a good thing, a business can experience growing pains. Also, every business carries a certain amount of risk. Markets, competition,financial conditions, government regulations and technologies all change very quickly. Outsourcing the business functions to the right providers, assume and manage this risk for you and they generally are much better at deciding how to avoid risk in their areas of expertise. Errors in the healthcare sector,especially in the patients’ medical records, can cost lives. Outsourcing partners strictly adhere to rules and regulations set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) so as to ensure that patient records remain private and are not wrongly entered. According to Healthcare Business Tech, close to $125 billion is lost every year due poor billing practices.Medical bills also contain large number of errors as changing billing rules and regulations are rarely updated on time.

Outsourcing billing operation scan help in avoiding critical billing mistakes as a dedicated team of trained professionals handle medical data entry tasks with 99% accuracy. As medical outsourcing vendors are compliant with the latest laws related to healthcaresuch as HIPAA and Health Care Reform Bill, they ensure the highest accuracy rates in all tasks such as medical coding, billing, claims adjudication,accounts receivable, records indexing and many more.

EXPAND AND INCREASED PRACTICE OFFERINGS

By outsourcing all the non-core activities, healthcare organizations can focus all their time and effort on providing excellent patient care thereby improving their level of productivity and profits. As outsourcing increases competitive advantage, it gives an international outlook to the business operations of the healthcare organizations. As the operations gain a high level of stability which also increases the quality of service provided, healthcare facilities can offer more number of services to their patients thereby giving them an edge over their competitors.

Currently,healthcare sector is facing increased regulatory compliance and declining bottom lines. Faced with increasing costs, healthcare BPO outsourcing is experiencing exponential growth with more and more healthcare facilities and hospitals outsourcing their diverse non-core activities to professional Healthcare BPO Outsourcing and Healthcare Support Service providers for better operational benefits which include decreased patient frustration, predictable cash flow, financially sound bottom line and increased net revenue.

Viaante is a HIPAA compliant HealthcareService Provider offering quality and customized services, which helps thehealthcare firms in improving business process efficiencies, deliver superiorcustomer service experience and boost their financial performance. Viaante hasyears of experience and expertise in delivering accurate, high quality,cost-efficient and streamlined BPO services that boost up the performance ofthe organization.

16th Jan 2019