During a Feb. 10 session at the Becker’s Health IT + Revenue Cycle Management Virtual Forum, sponsored by Access Healthcare, panelists discussed how their organizations benefited from outsourcing RCM services. Paul Reda, Director of the Healthcare Industry Group at Alvarez & Marsal, moderated the discussion. Panelists were:
- Desmond Jackson, Senior Director at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Health System
- Sean O’Rourke, Vice President at Teaneck, N.J.-based Holy Name Medical Center
- Kumar Shwetabh, CEO of Pacific Global, an Access Healthcare company based in Noida, India
Five takeaways:
1. The need for technical expertise and staffing drove Johns Hopkins and Holy Name to partner with an outsourced vendor. Both organizations were somewhat averse to partnering with an offshore vendor, rather than keeping the work in their communities, and they went through the process of analyzing the costs and potential challenges involved. But Mr. Jackson and Mr. O’Rourke said their respective organizations ultimately decided to partner with Pacific Global because of its skills and capabilities.
2. After selecting a vendor and executing a contract, Johns Hopkins and Holy Name faced challenges during the implementation process. For Johns Hopkins, one of those was putting the right international policies in place to govern an offshore partner, and one of Holy Name’s was the process of forming a true comprehensive, integrated partnership. Meanwhile, Mr. Shwetabh said Pacific Global had to ensure staff of the central business office of the organizations were comfortable with outsourcing, and that there was no decrease in revenue for the client during implementation.
3. Outsourcing has been beneficial in many ways for Holy Name, according to Mr. O’Rourke. For example, Mr. O’Rourke said Pacific Global has helped Holy Name keep up with its growth over the last five years, from about 50 providers to more than 270. “We would have never been able to keep up with the pace in terms of trying to build this on our own, if we were moving along, given the number of practices we brought on … so they’ve been a great extension of our team.”
4. Outsourcing has also been beneficial for Johns Hopkins, including gaining economies of scale, according to Mr. Jackson. He said: “We can flex up, flex down in our staffing needs as we need. And as well, we can look at technology as another bridge to where we need to go.”
He said the partnership with Pacific also provides the ability to look at automating more processes and removing waste from them.
5. Overall, Mr. Shwetabh sees the future of the RCM industry as a technology-based manpower- augmented industry, and he projects a growing RCM outsourcing market.
“If you take Pacific Global and our parent company, Access Healthcare, as an example, look at the amount of technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, which we have developed,” he said. “So, we have spent millions of dollars on all these tools. And I’m sure that in the future, more and more companies will be investing in automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning tools, and eventually, automation will play a major role.”
Click here to view the session. Click here to learn more about Access Healthcare.
