Outsourcing is in every company everywhere. Manufacturing, programming, customer service, design and recruiting are just the common things that a company outsources—even celebrities outsource their social media posts.
Healthcare uses outsourcing, too—with IT outsourcing the most common area. Thanks to electronic health records and portable electronic computers, healthcare information has now become simpler and effortless for healthcare providers to read and retrieve. And because the process of making healthcare information simpler and effortless to read and retrieve is complicated and tricky, a small number of medical institutions have an internal expert to be in charge of it. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires an ensured secured and exclusive IT system. But IT develops and innovates fast; making it difficult for busy medical professionals to keep up with the new developments and innovations.
Aside from the desire to fill the needs of basic IT, providers also look to the benefits of Big Data Analytics. Big Data Analytics is the process of examining big data to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information that can be used to make better decisions. Big Data Analytics is almost always outsourced. New ways of interaction with clients and prediction of outcomes are just a few things that big data analytics allows practitioners to do.
Outsourcing is also a reaction to the reduction of expenses situation that is passing on from major to average companies. 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. The healthcare field is not just outsourcing IT support. Hospitals and clinics also look for emergency room and specialty staffing, anesthesia, dialysis and diagnostic radiology. The industry report also said that outsourcing support in different areas will give healthcare institutions the ability to center on their institution built, minimize hiring and training costs and share risk.
Modern Healthcare conducted a survey in 2012, and discovered that the hospital which uses outsourcing the most in all of the United States is the Tri-County Memorial Hospital in Whitehall, Wisconsin. After two years, the CEO of the hospital, Brian Theiler stated that the hospital is still outsourcing in different areas and plans to continue in outsourcing to provide new services. “We’re looking at survival down the road for smaller community hospitals,” There will be more and more cutbacks in expenses as time goes by due to the continued cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments and the financial plan will just get compressed. “In the past, third-party insurance made up for what government didn’t pay. Now, they’re paying the same as the government, which is far less than it used to be.”
The said hospital outsources to a company that brings a semi-truck with equipment for their MR readings where patients go in for treatments and another company to do ultrasound. Theiler said that outsourcing has done great things for them and he is planning to outsource human resources, dietary services and emergency room physicians.
The ease of the operations is the main attraction of outsourcing but Theiler, along with other researchers, suggested that outsourcing is not for everything. “Relationships and teamwork are important in medicine, and it’s important not to let outsourcing disrupt them, and one should never outsource without carefully monitoring provider quality.”
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
