Peaks and Valleys of Healthcare Industry

Healthcare outsourcing units are often described as adding a second arm to the Indian outsourcing business. After medical transcription, disease management and claim processing are the fastest growing areas of Healthcare BPO. The drop in the revenue of the medical transcription industry from $38 million in 2002 to $26 million in 2006 resulting in a loss of almost nine per cent per annum led many to believe as the first sign of the collapse of the health care BPO in India. A report by NASSCOM revealed that the Indian health care outsourcing industry can capture $800 million alone from U.S health care service by the end of 2005.

Industry analysts are of the opinion that competition in business arena, technological and legislative changes worldwide are the key factors in driving more business to this sector. NASSCOM in one of its report says, "The recent customer demand for new products and services, increase in competition and a real-time business environment are making BPO an important toll for achieving success for health care majors". The health care industry is in consistent pressure. The need for cost efficiency provides the Indian ITES industries with a huge potential. What the companies need is to tap this market in more sophisticated areas, like disease management, claim processing or imaging.

While the Indian companies have somewhat captured the U.S or U.K market, a huge market remains completely untapped in countries like Germany and France. Language constrain here plays an important part. Till date, U.S is the largest market provider for health care outsourcing. But to sustain the competition, the Indian BPO players need to explore its possibilities in these areas as well. Quality human resource pool with a sound knowledge and experience in complex applications remain to be the latent strength for the Indian Health care BPO. In addition to this they also provide value added services, like diagnostic review by medical professionals.

All these services are provided in the most possible cost efficient way and charges only a fraction of their U.S or U.K counterparts. Another prospective area of growth for the health care BPO is in Clinical Research Organizations. These organizations conduct pathological experiments of new drugs on patients. The criterion here is that the company must be accredited by the College Of American Pathology, the global standard for pathological governance for projects related to these experiments.

But while extending its limits, the health care BPO operates with the conventional limitations of Business Process Outsourcing units. Like any other process, data protection and information security pose to be the two major threats for this industry. The industry confronts a constant challenge in sensitizing information and client data. While the peaks of health care BPO look shining with more services and prospective clients from new geographical locations, the valleys of data security and confidentiality can not be overlooked.

Considering the huge possibility of this industry, the response for health care BPO was almost instant. They plunged into this industry in the form of medical transcription. But now it's time for them to move ahead of medical transcription, enhance their domain knowledge and add new verticals to their Healthcare BPO services.

Economic downturn will drive in more business to Indian BPO

The failing world economy is a matter of concern to the global business. Leaders of small and large business are struggling hard to weather the storm of economic uncertainty. The headlines of a recent article in The Wall Street Journal shows "Executive shift to survival mode" as the strategy for this economic downturn. The economic pressure has raised the demand for Business Process Outsourcing. The Research and advisory firm, Gartner, in one of its reports shows that by 2010, the Indian BPO companies are expected to double its market share. Indian BPO players, like, WNS, Genpact, Aditya Birla, Minacs have proved themselves as powerful opponent to Western BPO.

By the end of 2008, the leading 20 Indian BPO reported a revenue of $4 billion, which is 5 per cent of the $80 billion revenue of the major 150 BPO companies. Another report by IDC provides an in-depth analysis of the current trends and opportunities in BPO, with special emphasis on Finance and Accounting BPO. According to this report, the customer trend shows a clear preference for supplier consolidation that are found in multi-function full scale BPO, like Accenture, or IBM or the Indian counterparts, like Infosys, HCL or Wipro.

If properly used, BPO can be a great tool in helping company survive the economic downturn and then thriving when the climate calms. Let us take a look at the benefits of BPO and why it is sure to bring in more business during the economic downturn:

• Decrease in the pricing structure: With right scope and service level, a business can attain a significant reduction in its cost structure within two to three quarters by outsourcing to third-party outsourcing providers. The savings can be 30 to 60 per cent of the current cost base.
• Changes fixed cost to variable: During periods of economic uncertainty, the volumes of business changes and the key to better management is to align the volume of your business to its cost. An important feature in many of the BPO is Unit Transfer Pricing or UTP. In this kind of approach, transactions are priced on per unit basis.
• Retain Customer Focus: It is the customers that suffer the most when it comes to any kind of change; merger, down-sizing or change in market focus. Reduced employee headcount should not mean a drop in customer care service. Losing customers can create a problem of survival and existence for an outsourcing company. BPOs actually aims in improving customer care service, not only by maintaining customer loyalty, but also shaping customer revenue. By facilitating customer interaction, BPOs can add as much as 50 per cent increase in your total revenue.
• Transparent Cost Structure: Information is a valuable asset. This is all the more true for economic downturn. Knowledge of the actual cost of delivering business processes is important. The very nature of the work, eliminates guesswork providing clarity to the components of cost.
• Put more focus on knowledge: In challenging economic times, the knowledge of identifying the right fact is necessary. Who is the customer, what will he buy, when will he buy, how much will be the cost of production-these are all essential knowledge that distinguishes a survivor.

2009 Cardiology Billing

This year marks to be one of the important years in medical billing and coding reformation system. Since 1990, this has been the most important change in the cardiology billing and coding system. The alternation in this year's billing system is sure to hit the cardiologists hard. Instead of 1% increase of the average physicians, the cardiologists this year finds a 2% per cent reduction in Medicare fees. But this 2% reduction in Medicare for cardiology can not be applied uniformly. There is a group of cardiology practitioners, like the heavy users of echo services, that remains above this reduction in cardiology billing.

Following are some of the recommended modifications for cardiological billing and coding:

• The codes used for follow-up on implanted devices and external devices have been completely replaced. The revised version now include codes for reprogramming of ICD and ICM devices, Loop recorders, Pacemaker and interrogation.
• The new codes are service specific. The most important is that every service now has its own specific corresponding code. Be it interrogation evaluation of a programming or reprogramming of ICD or ICM device, there is an assigned code for everything.
• Devices, such as, Cardionet also have codes now. The concept of billing unlisted code has become completely obsolete because of the recent change in billing and coding system.
• The global period of device follow-up is now changed to global periods of 30 or 90 days.
• The echo services also got its new code, for example, when echo is done with the help of a Doppler, now it gets a new code to submit that bunch of service into a single code.
• The same holds true for new stress echo code. The stress echo code combines the stress test code and stress echo code in a single code.

These are some of the major modifications of the cardiological billing system of 2009. The medical billing companies should be aware and well versed about these changes. A slight mistake or misconception might result in a huge loss. So 2009 is the time for the medical billing companies to upgrade and update itself to the latest changes in the cardiological billing and coding system.

Save 40% to 50% by outsourcing your Medical Coding project

The reason for the outsourcing boom is largely economic. Outsourcing helps you in saving a substantial amount of money without compromising for the quality of work. This remains most instrumental in the boon of the outsourcing business. Be it Business Process Outsourcing or Knowledge Process Outsourcing, the concept remains the same: high quality work at reduced rate within a specified turn-around-time. This is no exception for medical coding.

According to the statistics published by American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC), a certified U.S medical coder charges as high as $39,000 per year within his first two years of work. In an annual survey by American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) in 2005, brings to light the fact that a medical coder with about 10 years of experience charges around $45,000 annually. Education plays an important role in deciding the charges of the coders. A U.S medical coder with a master's degree charges $58,000 annually on an average.

Medical coding is an integral part of medical reimbursement process and can not be overlooked for a successful medical reimbursement. Outsourcing comes as the only viable option and relief from these ever mounting costs of medical coding. At the same time, outsourcing of medical coding projects ensured same high quality work within specified turn-around-time. Another survey on outsourcing of medical coding projects shows that outsourcing medical coding projects can save you at least 40% to 60% of your total medical cost. This reduction can no doubt increase your share of profit, but the quality of work can not also be overlooked.

The medical coders of Promantra are certified by American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) and holds years of experience in medical coding. Further, our medical coders comply with the ICD-9-CM Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting, AMA Guidelines from CPT-4 Code Manual and CMS (HCFA) Guidelines. Our coders also comply with the regulations of HIPAA in order to meet the set standards of Patient Health Information (PHI).

With an infrastructure certified to the international standards of ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 27001:2005, we assure complete data protection for the client. With years of experience in delivering high quality work within turn-around-time, Promantra medical coding service assures you the full advantage of outsourcing. Find a considerable reduction in your costs along with minimal denials by outsourcing your medical coding projects.

Electronic Medical Transcription

Like everything, medical transcription has also been through phases of evolution. Medical transcription is a rather dynamic industry with new experiments and additions going on everyday. The industry evolved from manual typewriters to electronic typewriters to word processor and then to plastic disks, magnetic belts and finally to digital recordings. Voice Recognition System or VRS is the recent evolution in the medical transcription industry.

VRS is used by medical transcriptionists and proof-readers in providing supplementary editorial services. There are certain cases where the VRS has completely replaced medical transcription. Earlier, medical transcription (MT) consisted of handwritten notes with lots of abbreviations and responsibilities of the physician. These notes and interpretations were then supplemented in patient’s file for reference.

The handwritten notes and typed notes are all consolidated and kept in a file along with the records of other patients for further reference. Whenever, a physician required the record of a specific patient, the patient’s file is retrieved from the huge mass of files. To enhance this process, usually two or three carbon copies of same medical record are kept in a single file.

But now things have completely changed. Huge files have given way to desktop computers that are connected with powerful servers. A patient’s record is processed and archived individually in these servers. The unique digital format allows instant access to these servers even from the remote location. Medical transcriptionists now work closely with the programmers to stream in voice and get continuous data through network interfaces.

In fact, healthcare providers now make use of personal data assistants (PDA) and other softwares for their service. The Computer Aided Medical Transcription (CAMT) is a software that is exclusively designed for medical transcription industry. The CAMT has several benefits that are attributing to its popularity. Following are some of them:

Changing Medical Dictation to Text: The CAMT software change spoken words to texts. This software was especially developed for medical transcription.

An Efficient Interface for Medical Transcriptionists: Using these softwares you can easily increase your editing speed. In these softwares, editing is done as fast as keyboard stokes and shortcuts.

Interpreting and Formatting Document: CAMT perfectly understands what a physician intends to mean and transcribe accordingly. For example, the software understands when the word "next" refers to ‘3’ in the list and when the physician uses it to mean the next section.

Every year the healthcare providers spend thousands of dollars for the increased charges of the MT industry. Further, there also had been a dearth in the number of efficient medical transcriptionists. The advent of the CAMT helped the service providers in saving few dollars that they would otherwise spent for the MT industry.

The invention of CAMT has revolutionized medical transcription industry. It can now deliver high quality work within turn around time (TAT). The software is simple and easy to use. This software has brought this industry at the edge of a huge change and it’s also time for us to change our concept of medical transcription.

AT Promantra, Electronic Medical Transcription attains a different height. We use a special software for medical transcription, named Proscribe. Proscribe handles the tiring job of file allocation and also checks the accuracy of the transcription. Proscribe would be soon taken to a new level which would include VRS that could be used for automatic dictation. Electronic Medical Transcription at Promantra is geared up with all modern paraphernalia to serve its existing and prospective clients with flawless transcription.