Digital advancements, consumer expectations, and emerging technologies push healthcare service providers to shift from legacy approaches to innovative techniques. With traditional means of providing healthcare services, the healthcare sector is quite fragmented. It also makes the information flow intensely inflexible. Thus, to reduce stringency and increase productivity for customer satisfaction, healthcare organizations are outsourcing healthcare-related business operations so that they can focus on the core tasks.
This article will give a comprehensive idea of healthcare business process outsourcing and its benefits.
What Is Business Process Outsourcing? How Does It Apply to Healthcare?
It is a method of sub-contracting or outsourcing different business services and operations to a third-party company or organization that has better skills at it. Lots of businesses want to outsource operations so that they can focus on their core business processes. Companies can outsource their business processes to payroll processing, human resources, IT services, accounting, and tax management, quality assurance, regulatory compliance, etc.
Healthcare business process outsourcing also termed Healthcare BPO, refers to the process or the outsourced business activity that provides administration and other support to medical organizations, staff, and institutions. The most common business process outsourcing services include transcription, billing services, coding, and many more.
It has become very important to predict problems and solve them before they even bother the customers or patients. In terms of customer experience healthcare has seen positive changes, but there is still room for improvement. To bring these changes the Healthcare BPO comes into the picture.
Healthcare BPO is the practice of outsourcing some non-core operations within the healthcare organization to business units, outsourcing agents, or third-party service providers. Outsourcing non-core business activities enable healthcare providers and hospitals to focus on core health-related operations, thus treating patients more efficiently. It also enhances the productivity of other non-core operations performed within the healthcare organization. It also increases room for improvement in various operational units within the healthcare sector.
Common Healthcare Business Process Outsourcing Solutions
- Data processing services: Apart from the patient’s care and service, healthcare organizations also process a massive data volume. These data could be prescriptions, drug inventory, and sales, tests and lab reports, bill payments, patient insurance details, doctors’, and services’ feedback, etc.
- Medical coding and billing: Medical professionals at hospitals and other healthcare units deal with tons of medical records every day. The need for coding and billing of such detail is a complicated task. If the healthcare organization starts doing the coding and billing part without proficiency, it could lead to errors and delays in patient bills processes. To eliminate coding and billing hiccups, we can outsource these operations.
- Processing claims: Claim processing by patients is another critical activity that needs proper handling. Patients should have appropriate medical declarations from their respective insurance firms. Often such claims lead to anomalies and disputes with the healthcare providers. Thus, it is better to outsource this task also.
Benefits Of Using Healthcare BPO
The healthcare sector is one of the largest industries serving millions of customers a day. Although the industry remains focused on diagnosing and treating patients’ ailments, certain operations are not a core part of the industry but need accurate management. To manage such tasks, healthcare organizations should opt for healthcare BPO services. Here are some benefits of outsourcing some non-core healthcare operations to third-party firms.
- Reduced Cost: Outsourcing specific operations that the organization does not have expertise in can help reduce the operational expenses of training employees in-house. Training and maintaining the in-house teams need constant focus on them. It often deteriorates the direction of the core operations of the business. So, it is better to outsource certain operations where the healthcare organization does not have expertise.
- Quality Service: Patients are the customers of healthcare organizations. Today, most businesses are customer centric. Thus, every healthcare organization wants to deliver a quality service to patients through expert services. To do this, the healthcare organizations’ executives must identify the non-core area and areas where they need to outsource their services to ensure that they focus on delivering the best to the customers.
- Access To Skilled Professionals: Outsourcing some business operations or hiring a third-party firm to get certain tasks done often becomes beneficial because of the skilled professionals they have. Outsourcing opens the door to access a pool of experts in the field who perform the task with efficiency by taking the lesser time. They also have experience and know how to avoid costly blunders.
- Data Storage and Security: Often data storage becomes risky and less secure when stored in-house. Also, backing up massive healthcare data is too costly. Thus, outsourcing data storage and security deliver a competitive advantage over the traditional way.
The Conclusion
Healthcare BPOs help in saving money and time, by providing the services that the patients deserve. To ensure the same, identify what services we can outsource and carefully verify the background of the service provider we are planning to hire. To take our healthcare business to the next level, by constantly increasing the satisfaction level of our customers, and by minimizing the cost, we should opt for outsourcing.
