Business Process Outsourcing

If you’re interested in business process outsourcing (BPO) and wondering how much you can increase revenue by doing so, take a look at the key advantages that experienced BPO companies offer. If you need to convince your company management to approve the idea of outsourcing, just present a spreadsheet outlining the costs of doing all of the below activities in-house: (or grab a copy of our Cost Savings template): 

Outsourcing call center services can be a money saver but it can also cause the loss of valuable business and ruin patient satisfaction scores — IF you select the wrong outsourcing company. Outsourcing makes sense for many organizations because you can gain expertise in areas your organization doesn’t focus on, like patient receivables. Outsourcing call center services relieves you of training, supervision and turnover costs, allowing your core staff to focus on your core business – the patients.

The days when patients went to the doctor’s office with very little knowledge and some semblance of understanding regarding their particular ailment, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment are loooong gone; everything the doctors said (or didn’t say) was once regarded as just the way it was and had to be. When patients left that 15-minute doctor’s visit they were armed only with the information and options that their doctor provided to them. For the doctors, the only real-time information they could provide was by drawing from what they knew from experience and then simply telling their patients that once the tests results came back, they’d be contacted.

So when you outsource, what are you really buying?

In a past career I needed to develop a better revenue forecasting and goal model for a centralized recovery operation (I oversaw the Agency Management arm of that recovery operation). What I wanted was a model that could accurately forecast gross and net revenues, account for multiple product lines, quickly roll-up numbers (product line, division, corporate) and drill down on numbers (vendor, batch, month), and establish goals for vendors.

It’s a mistake to think that formalized efforts to measure hospital patient satisfaction are just another government intrusion. Programs like the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey can not only bring you direct financial rewards (and who doesn’t want more of that?!), they can help your organization excel in the areas of ongoing growth and profitability.

I’m in the consumer contact business. For purposes of this blog, consumers are patients, tenants, retail purchasers, utility customers, and student borrowers. My list could go on, but I’m sure my list conveys the point that a consumer is a consumer is a consumer (there’s just simply different types of consumers). A lot of the work my company does involves consumer customer service, consumer accounts receivable management, and consumer bad debt collections.

Work Design

When I brainstorm the attributes of good work design, I come up with the following shortlist:

1. All the work is planned and planned in advance of a start date

2. Everyone involved in the plan knows the plan
3. Work within the plan is broken down into logical parts
4. All the people doing the work have clear role assignments
5. All the people doing the work are properly trained
6. Everyone involved in the plan knows their respective accountabilities
7. Plans are documented and readily accessible
8. Revisions and changes are captured (dates, reasons), documented, and communicated
9. The plan utilizes simple metrics to comprehensively measure production
10. The plan utilizes simple metrics to comprehensively measure performance

Business Associate Agreement:

As a healthcare professional and in light of the extensive changes (that’s an understatement…) and rules established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), it is critical that you take the time to review your current and entire list of third-party vendors and business associates to determine whether or not they understand and are compliant with the 2013 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). You should start by making a comprehensive list of all the companies and individuals which you do business and who – in some way – come in any sort of contact with a patient’s Personal Health Information (PHI). It’s important that you make sure all of your business associate agreements that need to be current and in place – are.

Over the last twelve months I’ve had the real pleasure of sitting in on a number of Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and American Association of Healthcare Administrative Management (AAHAM) presentations.  From my perspective, the presentations are always first class – knowledgeable and insightful speakers, relevant topics, and real solutions to real problems. It’s also easy to see that the events are consistently well attended and that the audiences are always highly engaged.

Ugh! Remember when October 1, 2014 seemed so far off into the future? The reality is, the ICD-10 official deadline is actually now looming. You can’t afford to screw up – literally – because your bottom line is at stake.

Don’t believe it? ICD-10 is transforming how you do business, whether you’re a sole practitioner or a major hospital. It’s an infection that will certainly spread from your clinical procedures to across-the-board operations and even your organizational structure, all of which affect your financial well-being.

ICD-10 will directly affect your revenue.