Like in most other industries, consumerization in healthcare is catching up fast. It is becoming a key trend across the industry and entails all stakeholders such as payors, providers and pharmaceutical companies. The growing trend of consumerization requires all the stakeholders to grasp the nuances of their consumers / patients so that they can tailor innovative business models to engage with the consumers across multiple touch points with improved health outcomes.
The easiest and fastest way by which providers can catch up with this trend is by partnering with healthcare BPOs. This is because consumerization demands healthcare providers to undertake complex back-office reengineering. The BPOs understanding of back-office dynamics can assist providers carry out the re-engineering with the right kind of value. The areas where BPO partners can help provider organizations meet the rising tide of consumerization include:
How Partnering with Healthcare BPOs Can Make Your Consumers Happy?
Healthcare BPOs can assist you become more consumer-centric in diverse ways. Some of them include:
Scalability.
Healthcare providers need to have the right strategy to accommodate operational growth. In some cases, even the best of strategies doesn’t work. This is because the demand for service may spike to such levels that scaling efficiently becomes difficult. Even if they manage to scale, the process isn’t seamless and comes at a huge cost. Either way the consumer gets affected. It is in such cases that a BPO partner can prove to be valuable.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, one challenge faced by providers was to provide service and answer queries at an unprecedented scale. Providers did not have the wherewithal to match up to the scale of demands. This is because they did not have the technology to scale. As a result, their processes either got slowed down or went for toss. This, however was not the case with healthcare providers who banked on established BPOs. These BPOs had the technology to support and so could assist providers scale up with ease.
There is yet another advantage of scaling up services with the assistance of a third-party partner – the ease of scaling down seamlessly. This means providers can seek services on a temporary basis and get back to the normal mode without any hassles. In a consumer-driven world BPOs help providers stay on their toes.
Process Optimization.
The advantage of BPO healthcare companies has transcended the concept of a cost-cutting imperative. Today, partnering with BPOs is seen as a strategic option to determine the best course of action. And the primary reason is to make healthcare service delivery a seamless experience for the consumers. This mostly entails introducing meaningful changes to constantly improve operations from stem to stern.
A good BPO partner will not just offer services as per best practices, but will build it around retrofitting their experiences. This way they can assist improve processes services with new ideas and genuine collaboration. The association can lead to a solid foundation of partnership, transparency, trust, and accountability. A provider can leverage the depth and breadth of a BPOs service capabilities to take process efficiency to next levels.
For instance, most healthcare BPOs today depend on advanced automation and analytics, to bring about process change improvements. You can piggy ride on them to get insights into your data. This will relieve you of the time and capital needed for developing these capabilities on your own. Likewise, you can bank on BPOs to leverage their understanding of payers and their processes and fine tune your processes. The cumulative impact of this is accurate and on time service delivery to the consumer.
Capability Enhancement.
A good BPO organization will bring new knowledge of skills to a practice. This can be of immense help to new practices in particular. The ability to bring skilled professionals literally out of the hats, particularly in a short span of time, can enable healthcare practices meet their immediate and long-term goals in a way that continuously improves overall outcomes.
BPO employees are highly trained and have both explicit and tacit knowledge of healthcare processes. Years of experience have helped them acquire knowledge of standard medical practice for a particular condition. This internal knowledge coupled with their knowledge of codes and HIPAA requirements can help you get added insights for process enhancement.
BPOs also help providers enhance their capabilities with advanced and customized trainings of employees. They have effective ways to transfer organizational knowledge – contained in the form of data and information and available across providers’ record and database – to their employees. This way their employees get acquainted inside-out with your departments and seamlessly become an extension of your team. In situation like staff shortage or attrition, providers do not have to worry about consumer experience.
Enhanced Agility
One of the primary requirements for healthcare providers is to be ready to meet tomorrow’s market changes and demand. The reason why most providers couldn’t meet the demands of the pandemic is their lack of preparedness.
In the upcoming years providers are likely to witness mergers and acquisitions. This will happen at a time value-based care arrangements will become the norm; consumers will become more empowered to take decisions and regulatory and financial pressures will grow. Healthcare organizations can meet these demands only by building a road map to infuse agility throughout their enterprise.
Much of their woes will get solved if they partner with third-party healthcare BPO partners. BPO healthcare have the agility needed to scale with the evolving needs of the market and their client partner. BPOs with experience across verticals can assist providers to adapt to the B2C mindset of other industries and deliver services with a more consumer-oriented mindset.
Co-creation with Genuine Collaboration
In a post-covid world, providers need to be patient-centric in their mission. They need to devise various ways of communicating with patients and give them the room to play an active role in service creation. This is a great way to boost value, quality and turn patients into partners. However, integrating this as a part of care delivery can be a challenge to providers.
Healthcare bpo companies have a big role to play in enabling this. They have various strategies to assist providers to elevate the customer experience to a level at par with other industries. This will ensure continuous improvement through smart processes and service excellence. A partnership along these lines will empower providers to drive genuine collaboration with new ideas. It can give rise to a solid partnership of transparency, accountability and trust in the mutual objective of a great consumer experience. Once this is attained, meeting the changing demands of consumerism becomes a lot easier.
Conclusion
In the age of consumerisation, healthcare bpo companies will be able to assist healthcare providers take bigger decisions with confidence. In the coming years they will play an active role in advising providers on programs, strategy rollouts, staffing and more. However, the challenge lies in picking the right BPO partner. If you are looking for a global partner, you need to look for one on equal footing in terms of scale, experience, expertise strategy, and development of programs.
Who We Are and What Makes Us an Expert?
This article is written by MedBilling Experts a premier back-office support provider operating from 8 global centers. We have over 10 years of experience in streamlining medical support services in compliance with HIPAA regulations. Our processes are driven by a team of expert billing professionals, with department specific knowledge and experience. Get in touch with us now to know more about our services.
