The healthcare industry is one of the world’s rapidly growing industries, and running a hospital or a clinic demands more business acumen than ever before. If you are a physician, or any other healthcare professional working with a small hospital of your own, maintaining a central vision while running your practice becomes difficult in the face of distractions from other affiliate areas of management, such as accounting, logistics, website designing, updating and maintenance, social media outreach, specialty departments, and other forms of administration.
The scale of your hospital also has a bearing in the expanse of similar businesses it may be pitted against, such as big hospitals or chains of multispecialty hospitals established and functioning for a very long time. Such hospitals come with their own teams that manage different distinguishable departments of administration with maximum efficiency. In order to not be pushed away into oblivion by such giants in the field, continue reading to find out what you can do to scale up your small hospital’s business expanse into a large scale one.
Why should I outsource my hospital’s services?
A great example of outsourcing in the healthcare industry is clinics and hospitals using Consulting Radiologists’ Women’s Imaging services when they do not have the capacity to perform these services themselves.
Unlike other industries, outsourcing from a hospital’s point of view is different in the fact that it is highly disparate and fragmented. While in other industries, businesses can afford to have simultaneous operations: such as accounting and data tallying, function at the same time without affecting the core procedure, every step of diagnosis of a patient, on the other hand, is linked from one step to the next. Thereby, it is difficult-if not entirely impossible-for diagnosis and analyses to happen at the same time. However, outsourcing is still helpful in the fact that it:
1) Cuts costs:
Taking the example of a radiology department, most hospitals function very well without one. Several outsourcing firms are already equipped with the latest technology and equipment required for an accurate radiology report then could be possibly acquired through the limited capital of a small-scale hospital. This means that all the money you had been saving up for the fixed cost of a certain high-end radiology equipment can now have its small fraction used for a better and timely report from equally skilled practitioners-if not highly skilled ones.
Moreover, as reported by EY.com, the global healthcare outsourcing market is expected to grow by 10.7 percent, and probably reach US$ 188.9 by the end of 2018. Ever since the Affordable Care Act was put into effect, outsourcing in medicine forms an integral component of the American healthcare system. Outsourcing also obviates the need to hire and train medical specialists, giving you the window to do away with this decision entirely, considering the temporary staff so acquired may not live up to your expectations and requirements, thereby resulting in huge waste on your capital. With outsourcing you can divert money to the best of human resources.
2) Allows more time for strategic innovations:
With mundane tasks handed out to outsourced firms, your in-house hospital staff will eventually find more time to work, think and analyze upon areas and skills they were already competent with since the start. That way, your hospital staff can diversify in their practice offerings to the patients, lending a competitive advantage over your peers in the game.
3) Reduces the probability of mistakes:
Data entry and updated maintenance of patient records cost a great chunk of the operator’s time. The tediousness and the monotony of the job, not to mention the extensive brain power required, often results in certain human errors that might not only hurt your business, but also your patients’ lives. The good news is, several outsourcing firms take up this task, with the accountability that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), makes them foster so as to ensure the privacy of data maintained and that no data is wrongly entered. The Health Care Reform Bill and HIPAA also ensure that customer billing mistakes are avoided and highest accuracy rates in all tasks such as medical coding, billing, claims adjudication, accounts receivable, records indexing, among others are kept in line.
4) Enhances patient gratification:
With patient experience at your hospital being enhanced through every step of the way- from diagnosis to check-in, treatment to discharge – due to the focused attention being paid to every aspect of your hospital’s operations involving patient treatment, there is higher probability of the reputation of your hospital getting magnified due to word of mouth. The improvement of these results in the standard of healthcare not only at your hospital but across the entire spectrum of the healthcare market; thereby increasing the goodwill for the healthcare industry.
5) Critical financial mistakes are avoided:
This is touching on previous points, but it worth reiterating. According to an article in the Huffington Post, hospitals leave an astounding $125 billion on table every single year because of poor, and erroneous, billing practices. This is mostly due to hospitals not being up to date with the fast changing billing standards and regulations, as well as billing errors. This requires staff to spend money and time on training, education and software. Why not outsource this to a company who specializes in this area and save precious time, resources, and funds.
Currently, the healthcare and hospital management sector are witnessing more and more compliance with regulatory practices due to the proliferation of skilled business process outsourcing (BPO) firms, in the sector. Hopefully, with more awareness of quality outsourcing firms, you can be assured of your hospital’s operations are being managed by the best, whether it is in-house or not.
