For your medical practice to be successful, it must provide outstanding medical care and patient support. Each patient who visits your facility leaves feeling well cared for, confident, valued and heard… or, feeling skeptical, rushed, ignored or dismissed. If your staff is spread thin dealing with things that don’t directly involve patient care, you may be sending patients the unintended message that they’re not a top priority. If they feel that way, they’ll be more likely to look for a medical practice that does make them feel valued. If your team is distracted by back-office administrative tasks, outsourcing those tasks frees up more time for patient interactions and follow up.
Outsourcing Can Make Good Business Sense
Most businesses decide to outsource functions because doing so is more cost-effective than hiring and paying employees to perform those tasks. There’s a more valuable benefit to outsourcing, though. It frees up employees to focus on higher-value activities that help a business achieve its long-term goals. For a medical practice, outsourcing back-office tasks allows employees to focus on patients who are present in the office, have scheduled appointments or who have recently been seen in the office.
In smaller medical practices in which physicians themselves may wear many hats, outsourcing is an even more valuable tool. Physician burnout is a real and pervasive problem. Caring for patients and struggling to complete all of the cumbersome administrative tasks associated with a medical practice isn’t beneficial to patient or provider.
What Can Be Successfully Outsourced
Think about your medical practice and your priorities. Your top priority is to provide outstanding, attentive care to your patients. Which back-office tasks are necessary – but also tedious and time-consuming? Which functions can you safely outsource to a third-party and, in fact, may actually be performed better by a third-party specialist? Here are four examples.
Medical Billers. This is a highly complex, tricky task that is critical to your practice’s survival. It makes sense to outsource this vital responsibility to a team of individuals who are well versed in the nuances of claims processing. Medical billers will be able to do the job more quickly and more accurately – and you’ll feel a weight lifted off your shoulders when you hand this over to a specialist.
Medical Transcription. This is a no-brainer. Transcribing your records and notes is a redundancy that you and your staff shouldn’t spend time on. Transcription services typically have technologies that enable them to do the job much more quickly than you could in-house.
IT Management. Software development, population health challenges, analytics, electronic health records, health information exchange… the IT demands of a medical provider are complex and continually evolving. Outsourcing your IT could, arguably, be the smartest decision you make as a practice owner. One survey of hospital administrators that outsourced their IT found that 90 percent had achieved or were near achieving a return on investment in just three months.
Marketing. You’re a doctor, not a spin doctor. Having a website and marketing presence is essential. But it’s definitely a job that’s best turned over to a company that specializes in that. Your job is to solve complex medical puzzles, not to puzzle over how to get Google to rank your website higher.
Outsourcing your medical practice’s back-office tasks can improve productivity and profitability. However, make sure any third-party provider you work with understands your privacy obligations under HIPAA and has checks and balances in place to ensure the privacy of your patient’s information. Ask for references and call them. The vendors you choose will be an extension of your practice, so make sure you trust them implicitly.