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It’s 2022, and outsourcing isn’t an outlandish idea anymore. With healthcare facilities across the country making the decision to outsource their healthcare business operations, this might lead you ask yourself – why? And should your healthcare facility follow suit?
Medical coding is one of the more commonly outsourced healthcare business functions. However, before making a decision, you want to objectively consider the benefits of outsourcing instead of merely following a trend.
As a high-quality service provider delivering comprehensive healthcare business solutions to top ‘out-of-hospital’ healthcare providers, we know more than a thing or two about outsourcing your medical coding operations. If you’re considering outsourcing these operations but still have concerns or don’t fully understand what the benefits would be, here are some reasons that outsourcing often works better that you can imagine. These reasons are strongly rooted in insights from our experience working with some of the best healthcare facilities in the industry.
1. Increased Transparency
In theory, the idea of outsourcing may sound like relinquishing control to strangers and having reduced control over critical outcomes. In practice, with the right outsourced service provider, it actually involves greater accountability from the service provider with lower stress on your organization. When working with a high-quality service provider, your organization will have access to a pool of highly skilled coders who have well-defined metrics and targets to adhere to. An outsourcing firm is liable to meet these targets and provide you with a number of reports that are often more detailed and insightful than those that are provided by internal teams, simply because your internal teams often have so much on their plates. In this way, working with a high-quality service provider is a breath of fresh air to most organizations, purely because of the exponentially improved transparency.
2. Expedited Insurance Payments
Outsourcing firms combine highly skilled teams of coders and well-defined processes and metrics, to minimize errors and ensure that bill payments and reimbursements are received in a shorter period of time. The streamlined workflows and multiple levels of quality control that are embedded into the system all work to ensure higher earning potential for your organization.
3. Lower Costs
When one hires a dedicated internal medical coding team, their salaries aren’t the only expense involved. An employer also has to pay significant overhead in the form of benefits, onboarding costs, and training expenses. This can make hiring an internal team an expensive, unoptimized approach to medical coding. On the other hand, an outsourcing company provides for their own employees’ well-being and delivers better results at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated team.
4. Consistent Staffing & Regularized Cash Flows
People are naturally prone to needing time off from work for various reasons, and workforce shortages are sometimes a given. However, that isn’t the case when it comes to outsourcing. Outsourcing makes your organization immune to the effects of attrition and fluctuations in staffing levels. A high-quality service provider ensures that their medical coders function akin to an extended team for your organization. By simple extrapolation, this consistency also ensures regular cash flows with no bottlenecks in your billing operations.
5. Ease of Scalability
When you work with a high-quality service provider, your healthcare facility gets access to the provider’s pool of highly skilled coders. This gives your organization the flexibility to overcome exponential increases in workload, since the service provider can increase the number of coders working on days when this flexibility is required. You can also work with your outsourced service provider to plan for any significant jumps in growth for your company, through acquisitions for example, so that you can be confident that your quality and coding metrics will remain consistent through period of change. This completely bypasses the need for hiring processes that are often costly, drawn-out, or simply unfeasible when an unexpected, immediate, or substantial need for manpower arises.
6. Increased Patient Satisfaction
Perhaps the biggest and most important benefit of outsourcing your medical coding operations, is that it enhances patient satisfaction quite significantly. Outsourcing medical coding operations takes an additional responsibility off the hands of your clinical and support staff, thereby freeing them up to better focus on delivering a better patient experience. By focusing on addressing patient needs and smoothly carrying out support and clinical functions, patient satisfaction can be significantly increased – thus leading to higher patient retention and more growth for your organization.
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As mentioned earlier, these benefits aren’t rooted in assumptions but, rather, from our work with clients who are experiencing these benefits and more. If you’re ready to discover what outsourcing can do for you, please get in touch with us so that we can show you the Power of More – more benefits for your business than ever before.
