Healthcare Outsourcing: Short Term Trend or Long

Healthcare Outsourcing: Short-term Trend or Will It Stay for Long?

Posted on May 5, 2016

As finances become tighter and the use of IT-based systems become a necessity, several health centers, hospitals, and medical professionals have begun to outsource a plethora of services so as to minimize operational inefficiencies. Currently, the trend of outsourcing healthcare services in increasing significantly, and is not expected to shrink in the coming years as well.

Areas of Outsourcing in Healthcare

Conventionally, health systems and hospitals used to outsource only support services such as laundry services, housekeeping, supply chain management, and food services. But nowadays with rapid advancements in technology and the emergence of new avenues for providing services and serving patients, the trend of outsourcing is not only increasing, but is also spreading its net wider with a lot more services coming under the outsourcing tag. Let us have a look at the top healthcare services which are getting outsourced nowadays –

  1. Medical Billing and Coding

    Medical Billing and Coding services are amongst the most outsourced services in the healthcare industry, and there are countless health centres and hospitals which have benefitted by outsourcing these services. Some of the benefits include lower overheads, lesser need for management staff, less employee hiring, efficient outcomes and lowered cost. Owing to these advantages, outsourcing for medical billing and coding operations will only increase in the years to come, especially with recent sweeping changes which have impacted the healthcare industry such as ICD-10.

  2. Medical Transcription

    Medical transcription services include compiling discharge summaries, teleconference notes, clinical summaries, patient charts, operative reports, rehabilitation reports, progress notes, medical records summary, etc. The outsourcing of these time-intensive tasks is also increasing year after year, and soon, there will be many more health centers seeking reliable partners for medical transcription services outsourcing.

  3. IT Systems Management and Consulting

    Medical professionals are not the best people to take care of software-related tasks and other hospital management systems. More often than not, small practices find it challenging to keep up with new infrastructure which are installed or implemented to ease the management of day-to-day tasks, keeping records and performing other activities. As a result, most healthcare centers have started outsourcing these services to offshore IT firms which can handle these systems, deploy them, implement them, and troubleshoot the issues whenever required. Also, as the data generated from these practices become more complex and vital for gaining valuable insights, the healthcare service providers look towards outsourcing to solve their IT related tasks so that they can focus on their core activities.

  4. Clinical Services

    There has been a significant growth in outsourcing patient care and clinical services as well throughout the world. As per a leading health professional, the top outsourced clinical services include emergency department staffing, anesthesia, diagnostic services, dialysis services, and hospital staffing. It is also expected that we will continue to witness a significant growth in outsourcing in these areas in the next couple of years as well.

The Future of Outsourcing in the Healthcare Industry

Today, Healthcare has become a cost-driven initiative. Everyone wants high-quality results, but wants them at less cost. As a result, the outsourcing trend has taken off in the healthcare industry. At the same time, most analysts predict that consolidation in the healthcare industry might result in this outsourcing trend to reverse. As hospitals and practices would get bigger, they would either set up their own operations for better quality results or pool in with others to set up joint operations. Also, more stringent regulations would mean that not every outsourcing provider would be able to provide shoddy services and get away with it.

Flatworld Solutions is a leading outsourcing firm that offers a comprehensive suite of healthcare outsourcing services to support its health center clients and medical professionals so that they can emphasize on their core operations. Should you have any requests pertaining to outsourcing health care or medical billing & coding related services, feel free to contact us at Flatworld Solutions. Leave a comment below to share your requirements and our executives will contact you to discuss about the same.

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