Outsourcing medical services can give a competitive advantage in providing excellent customer service and growing a successful medical practice.
What makes a good medical services team? If you ask any healthcare provider, the answer usually boils down to a commitment to patient care. Aside from that, a sense of urgency, empathy towards patients, and strong teamwork amongst staff can also be factors to a medical firm’s success.
According to a recent study, 47% of consumers view healthcare companies as being more focused on industry needs rather than their needs as a patient. Although a healthcare facility does all they can to cater to patients, the truth of the matter is, medical facilities are still businesses that must perform well to gain returns.
The dilemma of healthcare
From the year 2020 up until now, hospitals and smaller practices have reported significant losses due to the pandemic. With that in mind, the pressure to deliver quality care while balancing this struggle proves to be a difficult problem to overcome.
So, what can a medical services provider do?
90% of healthcare execs are looking to cut down on costs by building relationships with third-party vendors. Outsourcing certain parts of the medical process can be the key to hitting that sweet spot of delivering exceptional patient care, while achieving cost savings and ultimately, increased returns.
What healthcare services can be outsourced?
Healthcare outsourcing can involve delegating tasks such as medical billing, customer service, data transcription, and even IT support. Transferring such responsibilities to specialized outsourcing providers who can hire candidates, onboard them, and provide them with the facilities to start working is the usual course of action.
What makes outsourcing so attractive for healthcare facilities these days? Let’s explore the pros and cons.
The Pros of Outsourcing a Healthcare Support Team
- Cost Savings: Of course, the top reason why businesses outsource is to bank on cost savings. You may have heard that hiring and training staff can cost a lot, especially in highly-skilled industries such as healthcare.
- Focus on Clinical Activities: Most healthcare firms outsource non-core activities such as transcription and medical coding. By outsourcing these functions with minimal patient contact, you can be sure your onsite staff and providers are laser-focused on providing care to patients, improving team efficiency and bettering patient outcomes.
- Scalability: Outsourcing allows you the freedom to scale your services up or down as you see fit, or as demand for medical services in your area fluctuates.
- Better Access to Specialists: Outsourcing allows you to link up with specialists and experts with experience in healthcare support services. Normally, you’d have to focus on hiring from your area, but with outsourcing, you can expand your horizons to include other countries when searching for candidates.
- Rapid Implementation: By outsourcing, you can implement changes and technologies faster as they occur. Changes in industry standards and coding regulations can be easily adapted when you have a team that’s specialized and can study these changes accordingly.
- Focus on Innovation: With your outsourced team taking care of routinary tasks, your team has more leeway to streamline and improve on in-house operations. Now you can adapt potential advancements in patient care, and increase your overall patient care levels.
- Reduced the Need for Employee Micromanagement: With outsourcing, you can worry less about micromanaging employees, since a dedicated manager will oversee your outsourced team. Their performance is carefully considered as well, thanks to continuous management efforts such as including training, quality control, and continuous performance evaluation.
The Cons of Outsourcing Healthcare Support Services
- Cultural Differences: As you work with people from different cultures, there can be communication breakdowns that occur due to language barriers. Thankfully, outsourcing to countries with high English proficiency (such as the Philippines) can minimize such mishaps.
- Long-Term Costs: Although outsourcing can be costly, it can yield significant benefits as mentioned above, making it a worthy long-term investment in the long run.
- Regulatory Compliance: Making sure to comply with regulations such as HIPAA, can be challenging, but with your outsourced team constantly on the lookout for industry changes, you don’t need to spend a lot of time making adjustments to comply with these.
- Lack of Institutional Knowledge: Your newly-outsourced team might lack the deep institutional knowledge that in-house staff possess. Outsourcing service providers with proven experience in the healthcare sector understand the value of ongoing communication and knowledge exchange between all involved parties.
All in all…
When outsourcing for healthcare, there is no cookie cutter solution. Since there are many pros and cons that can affect every business, you should weigh your options and consider the best plan for action. Factors such as the size of your facility and the nature of the services you offer can affect the strategy you employ.
Thankfully, outsourcing partners can fully customize their offerings to fit what your firm specifically needs. Whether it’s a stronger patient response line, or a more efficient scheduling team, or adept medical billers, a reliable one will create a plan that’s tailor-fit for you. You can trust FGC+ with that — we’ll recruit, onboard, and put together a great outsourced team for you. Learn more through our website at www.fgcplus.com.
