Outsourcing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Outsourcing - Essay Example In addition, rapid changes in technological advancements force the healthcare organizations pace with the latest changes. Outsourcing is a better way to minimize risk factors in terms of technology evaluation and result accuracy. Many healthcare professionals believe that the outsourcing approach in the healthcare sector would deliver quality services to beneficiaries and thereby improve patient safety. This paper will discuss several aspects of the outsourcing practice in healthcare industry and suggest best practices that can make outsourcing effort successful. Prevalence and Trends The practice of outsourcing is extremely prevalent in the healthcare industry and admittedly, this trend is growing dramatically. US healthcare system is the most expensive in the world. As Pear (2004) reports, the US’ healthcare spending accounts for nearly 15% of its GDP whereas most other developed nations spend only 7-10% of their GDP in healthcare. The increased healthcare expenditure forces the country to adopt low cost and efficient options like outsourcing in order to cut down its spending. An aging population in the US not only increases the demand for healthcare but also leads to a paucity of available experts. In addition, the medical transcription (MT) industry has undergone tremendous changes over the past few years. As a result, the scope of MT jobs has increased and MT professional are expected to undertake additional tasks such as editing, checking, and supervision in the near future. Therefore, the US healthcare organizations increasingly and extensively follow the outsourcing approach so as to reduce healthcare expenses and to deliver better services to clients. Today, it is widely seen that healthcare firms outsource their administrative processes that require high degree of expertise and huge resources. By practicing this approach, healthcare organizations can focus more on service quality and patient safety. The services such as billing, coding, staffin g, and information technology are greatly outsourced by hospitals and other healthcare institutions. â€Å"Modern Healthcare’s annual Outsourcing Survey found that the top 20 outsourcing firms, based on the number of national healthcare clients, reported 13.1% growth between 2010 and 2011† (Expertise on call, n. d.). Staff shortage is growing to be an immense challenge in the modern healthcare environment because of a number of socio-economic factors. As staff recruitment is an expensive and time consuming task, today many of the healthcare organizations outsource this task to external agencies (American Healthcare Outsourcing, n. d.). Since this approach would assist the health organizations to enhance staff retention, more and more firms tend to outsource staff recruiting and training activities to outside agencies. Health care technologies and practices are advancing everyday and firms perceive outsourcing as a better way to take advantages of the potential innovati ons and to reduce unproductive work time. It is found that the outsourcing practice is more common in large sized health organizations because those firms need to manage troublesome administrative and operational activities. Successes and Failures While evaluating the experience of healthcare organizations that have tried outsourcing, it seems that majority of those firms could attain competitive advantages while some others failed to achieve the desired benefits. Generally, the