According to an October 2022 report, the United States spends more on healthcare administration, at 15-30% of total healthcare spending than comparable countries. It is estimated at least half of this spending is wasteful. Compounding this problem for hospitals and practices is declining reimbursements from payors and still-persistent inflation.
Business process outsourcing (BPO) can help. With an effective BPO partner with technological advancements such as robotic processing, firms like Radiant Healthcare can streamline administrative work, helping hospitals and practices focus on delivering optimal patient care and quality.
What is business process outsourcing?
BPO involves contracting a specialized service provider to manage and execute specific outsourced administrative business processes. A good BPO partner will go beyond simple outsourcing and unleash the potential of technology-driven savings in time and labor by strategically assessing and optimizing an organization’s business processes.
By examining and reimaging a wide range of processes, including patient registration, billing and coding, claims processing, revenue cycle management, and more, BPO firms can optimize operational efficiency, significantly reduce costs, and improve overall performance. Each of these areas plays a crucial role in the financial health and sustainability of practices.
The benefits of healthcare business process outsourcing
Reputable BPO partners possess deep expertise, staying on top of industry regulations, coding practices, and compliance requirements to ensure accurate and timely execution of administrative processes. These partners also leverage advanced technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and data analytics using artificial intelligence (AI), which leads to quicker turnaround times, improved data accuracy, enhanced decision-making, and more precise allocation of resources. By analyzing patterns and trends from past data, an advanced BPO firm can enable healthcare organizations to allocate resources efficiently, an incredible benefit.
There are numerous other positive outcomes as well.
Operating an in-house administrative department can be costly, involving software, infrastructure, and training investments. Outsourced business processing allows healthcare practices to avoid these initial expenses since the outsourcing partner already possesses the necessary resources.
BPO also allows organizations to remain nimble. Practices often experience fluctuations in patient volume and administrative demands. BPO services offer scalability, enabling practices to adjust their outsourcing requirements as needed, avoiding overstaffing during slow periods, and ensuring adequate support during peak times.
Business process outsourcing also enhances the overall performance of healthcare organizations by streamlining administrative processes, which are often intricate and time-consuming. By outsourcing these tasks, healthcare practices can reduce manual errors and accelerate task completion, improving efficiency and productivity. Healthcare executives can also achieve higher productivity, quality, and patient satisfaction by aligning processes with strategic goals. A well-optimized revenue cycle management powered by effective BPO ensures steady cash flow and financial stability. Outsourcing revenue cycle management tasks, such as billing and claims processing, ensures timely reimbursements, reduces denials, and optimizes revenue realization.
Finally, and most importantly, BPO returns the focus to the patient. By automating routine but necessary administrative tasks, such as patient registration and billing, providers can redirect their focus toward providing high-quality patient care, leading to better health outcomes.
Business Process Outsourcing in Action
Numerous healthcare organizations have embraced BPO. For instance, when a leading U.S. national medical group did not have enough data engineers, analysts, and reporting specialists to complete required analyses, it turned to Radiant Healthcare, which deployed a team of experts to create analytics pods that were responsible for extracting, processing, and analyzing data from various sources.
Radiant’s engineers built pipelines to the data, including electronic health records (EHRs) and claims databases, into semantic engines and PowerBI/Tableau. They also developed algorithms to process the data quickly and accurately, which allowed them to generate insights in near real-time.
The deployment of analytics pods enabled this organization to increase their speed to insight significantly, allowing them to make data-driven decisions that improved patient outcomes. Clearly defined semantic layers permitted the modular reuse of data components to make analytics more composable. Deploying analytics pods also allowed the team to reduce labor costs and improve scalability. By automating data processing and analysis, the firm reduced the time and resources required to generate insights by 50%.
From streamlining processes and improving efficiency to reducing costs and enhancing patient care, BPO with Radiant Healthcare offers a host of benefits for healthcare organizations. As executives prioritize operational excellence, they should consider adopting this strategy.