The healthcare industry is witnessing unprecedented churn and transformation, leading to a surge in the adoption of IT outsourcing services and business process outsourcing. In healthcare sector, delivering excellent patient care and improvement in the patient’s experience turns into recommendation to others resulting business growth. To reach out to this, proper balance of information technology (IT) is important function.
According to RnR Market Research, The global healthcare IT outsourcing market is forecast to grow at CAGR of 7.6 percent, to reach $50.4 billion by 2018.
According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, The U.S. healthcare IT outsourcing market is expected to grow by 42.8 percent in the next five years.
Healthcare lags implementation of IT solutions because of its highly fragmented structure which creates barriers to the flow of information across the value chain.
Why IT Outsourcing ?
For efficient working, the healthcare sector depends to a large extent on data collection and analysis. The seamless flow of information across the entire value chain is of critical importance. However, most healthcare providers are not in a position to hire and train in-house staff for managing IT infrastructure and systems and that is why the healthcare companies need to outsource their IT related needs.
The reasons why companies outsource certain business functions include:
Reduced Training Costs - Healthcare organizations which choose to outsource do not need to worry about additional expenses such as organizing staff training sessions, employee education, etc. The outsourcing partner takes care of all staffing requirements and ensures that their employees are up to date with the latest technology pertaining to the exact outsourcing requirements of the client.
Big Data Management - The healthcare industry, generates huge amounts of data related to medical records, billing codes, electronic monitoring systems, and patient care. Due to the lack of required skills and IT domain expertise, maintaining IT infrastructure and services is a challenging task for the healthcare industry To track and manage this valuable data. This has resulted in an unprecedented demand for IT infrastructure outsourcing which enable healthcare providers to focus on their core service areas.
Better Reach - Healthcare industry has a great ascend. It has become really important for companies to reach out to their target audience. For accomplishing this, One of the most common business operations being outsourced nowadays is healthcare application development. In this technologically dominant era, business apps are necessary for even the health care
Cash Flow - Receiving payment from payers in the shortest amount of time can be done by outsourcing medical billing service to a technical expert. It can submit your claims faster preventing errors in payment posting generating in good cash flow.
Ease of Work - Hospitals & healthcare centers can save large amounts of money. By outsourcing billing operations dealing of work is done by trained professionals who are technologically-proficient and can handle important tasks avoiding several critical billing mistakes.
Focus on Main Aim - Outsourcing helps healthcare providers to reduce their tedious management and administrative workload, while focusing their attention on high-quality patient care by outsourcing their work to tech savvy people who can look after all the non-medical processes and operations thus,delivering their main aim.
Significant Cost Savings - Outsourcing is also a reaction to the reduction of expenses. A recent industry report stated that the world healthcare IT outsourcing will increase from the $35 billion market in 2013 to a $50 billion market in 2018. Healthcare can effectively reduce their expenses without requiring to compromise with the quality of patient service.
What Can Be Outsourced ?
By 2020, 80 percent of healthcare data will pass through the cloud at some point in its lifetime as providers increasingly turn to the cloud for data collection, aggregation, analytics and decision-making.
A new report from Gartner shows that during the next two years the healthcare organizations will having a substantial increase in their investments for Applications Development.
Applications Development
The Application Development area includes solutions like:
1#) Electronic Medical Records (EMR), which refers to an individual patient's medical record in digital format. EMR systems are believed to increase physician efficiency and reduce costs, as well as promote standardization of care.
2#) Laboratory Information Management Systems is a type of software which automates the process of receiving data from laboratory instruments, processing, and storing this information
3#) Software Oriented Architecture enables all of your applications to work together, and enhances communicate. This allows you to respond more quickly and cost effectively to changing market or environmental conditions.
Operations Management
Operations Management integrates quantitative and qualitative aspects of management to determine the most efficient way of supporting patient care delivery. It handles eliminating waste of time and money on transportation, inventory, motion, over processing and of course, defects. Operations Management effectively cuts these costs.
Security
Outsourcing IT security offers specialized personnel for keeping your security up to date by giving secure access to confidential patient information, while allowing, rapid mobile access to the information for its employees.The role of a security system is to allow access to medical files and other organizational documents to authorized personnel only, by creating a custom system for each healthcare organization.
CRM
A CRM application for healthcare institutions helps lower the costs of managing quality of the relationship with their patients, suppliers etc; saves time through shared schedules and advanced search options simplifies the physician credentialing process, and increases staff retention rates.
Concluding it, Outsourcing can be taken as competitive advantage. The right solution maximizes your reimbursements, decreases denials and increases profitability. The long term prospects seem to be good. However, some of early players are still expanding.