01 May Outsourcing Vs Off-Shoring
I’m an Information Technology (IT) professional. A lot of the work I perform is on an as-needed basis vice steady, full-time employment. Many IT professionals are in the same boat. It’s not in everyone’s best interest to maintain a dedicated IT staff so many companies outsource their IT labor. Outsourcing is contracting someone or a company to perform work for your company. Outsourcing medical billing and practice management makes a lot of sense for the same reasons as outsourcing an IT person or staff.
Outsourcing saves your company money by:
1. Ensuring you do not have a full-time employee sitting around, getting paid, with nothing to do.
2. Providing a group of people to serve your needs instead of a single person; and therefore a single point of failure.
What happens when your in-house billing expert is sick? Or what happens when your expert doesn’t know what to do? Temporary disabilities, maternity/paternity leave?
Outsourcing provides a better, continuous, adaptable solution.
This does not have to mean the person performing the work is in another country.
Outsourcing can be to a local entity, an out-of-state entity, or an entity from another country. Outsourcing to entities in other countries has been dubbed off-shoring. So? Who cares? You care.
Maybe you already outsource your medical billing. Maybe you are only now considering it. Do you know if the company you contract with is also outsourcing tasks within the tasks they perform for you? Do you think they would tell you? Some medical billing companies send your patients’ data to other countries to reduce their overhead in processing paperwork, scanning documents, etc.
What could happen.?. Well, if anything happened, what would you do about it? What could you do? Maybe you can take legal action against the billing company. While you are painstakingly suing the billing company, how do you deliver the news to your patients? Do they remain your patients after such an incident?
Where is the line drawn? If your billing company is willing to off-shore even one portion of the services they provide to you, what is to stop them from off-shoring all of it? How long before you call them and the line is forwarded to someone who you can barely understand?
Do you know where your data is?
Do you know where your patients’ data is?
My advice to Medical Practitioners is to:
1. Outsource if you aren’t already.
2. KNOW who is performing all work with your data.
3. Visit your billing company location, surprise them even.
4. Meet the people who answer your calls, meet the IT staff, see what the working conditions are.
5. Avoid off-shoring.
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