Businesses and organizations could be excused for not estimating the full implication of running a business or organization when they set out to create one. Someone with a vision for starting a scooter rental service could hardly be expected to know about the challenges in hiring people for various roles. Someone else interested in starting a medical center may not know about the financial compliances enjoined upon the business to fulfil every quarter and every year. While these cannot be excuses, and a business and organization person should make the effort to know everything, the point being made is that the focus and interest is likely to be on the area of work, the scooter service or medical center in this example. Thankfully, help is at hand. There are a wide variety of providers What could be the benefits of engaging a provider for medical billing data entry?
Focus on the patient
When you opted for a career in healthcare, it was probably with the objective of working with patients and helping them get better, whether you are a doctor or a nurse or a clinical technician. The objective would not have been to fill forms, bank checks, track unpaid bills and maintain records. Of course, we understand that every job and every industry has an administrative component, but that should not be the one driving our lives. It should be a relatively minor component of our professional lives. Outsourcing medical billing
data entry services enables you to do just that; focus on the people who seek medical care and support from you. oWorkers has been providing
BPO services to global clients for over eight years. In their chosen area of focus, data based services, they have been repeatedly identified as one of the top three providers in the world. Engaging them as a partner will give you the space to focus on your core constituency, the patient seeking medical attention and care.
Medical billing data entry leads to a reduction in errors
This can also be expressed as an enhancement in accuracy. Errors entail a cost for every business. There is a cost of lost business. There is a cost of checking and control, There is a cost of rework. In healthcare, that cost can be magnified, as it deals with the health and well-being of human beings. Incorrect information could lead to wrong diagnosis and treatment, with the worst outcomes being the impact on a human being. While healthcare might wish for less, the very sensitivity of the industry engenders the need for greater control, which creates the need for more forms and keeping track of more information. Engaging a professional organisation for doing this work can go a long way in reducing errors that lead to disastrous outcomes in the form of human impact. oWorkers employs a full-time Internal Quality team. This is made up of Quality Analysts (QAs) whose job is to track the work being done by the delivery organization and ensure errors are not creeping in. They are also constantly exploring methods of improving processes so that accuracy can be enhanced and time taken reduced. They report directly to the senior management. This keeps the leadership informed about shopfloor happenings, allowing them to jump in as and when they see the need.
Better systems, applications and processes for medical billing data entry
Data entry not being a core activity for a healthcare organization, the interest in investing in it with the purpose of improving the systems and processes is limited. It is something that somehow needs to get done. They would rather work on improving the medical systems which will enable better care and support to the seekers of medical services. And that makes perfect sense, does it not? That is why they are there. That is the reason for their existence. However, what happens is that the support systems fail to keep pace with the advances that take place in other parts of the core organization. In fact, they could often become the stumbling blocks, the reason why the organization cannot do more or cannot do better. Hence, whether we like it or not, at some stage they start crying for attention. Engagement of a specialist can prevent this issue and ensure that the support systems keep pace, and sometimes lead, the rest of the organization. This is because the partner has an interest in doing the job more efficiently. Moreover, if they do similar work for multiple organizations, the combined heft in terms of volumes enables a much more justifiable case to be made for investments in improvement. The partnerships oWorkers has forged across a spectrum of technology providers enables us to access the best technologies for solving client problems at all times. Many of our clients are IT firms who also ensure that we are current as far as technologies are concerned.
Cash Flow management
Money is the proverbial blood that courses through the veins of an organization. It is the common denominator in which all its activities can be expressed. It is what they earn when their services are taken up by their clients and it is what they spend when they need to procure the supplies and pay for services that keeps their ship afloat. And this is not just about commercial organizations. Non-commercial organizations, and some hospitals may be run by nonprofits, need to manage money as well. Their sources of getting money may not be client billings, but there will be a source. It could be government funding or it could be private donations. They still need that money because they need to pay salaries and buy the supplies for providing their services. A professional partner doing medical billing data entry keeps the wheels turning. Bills go out faster, payments can be tracked and received faster, while reducing the ones that get forgotten or lost. They may even have the knowhow to introduce processes that result in additional revenue-generation strategies like combination offers, which may be useful for patients as well. oWorkers has enabled many clients to save money. Clients from the US and Western Europe report savings of upto 80% after outsourcing to oWorkers. This does not include the financial discipline that comes about resulting in quicker billing and realisation.
Compliance with regulatory requirements and industry practices
In a dynamic world a lot keeps changing. Regulations can change, as can industry standards and practices. Non-compliance of regulatory stipulations could have implications, mostly financial. Support services not being anyone’s favorite child, could translate into an inability to keep pace with changes taking place, which could lead to financial implications. Outsourcing to a specialist can secure you against such eventualities. A specialist’s interest lies in tracking regulation and practice and ensuring compliance. They are aided in the exercise by the fact that they could be doing the same work for a number of clients. Hence, the cost of a miss in their case will be steep. With the support of the communities we work with, oWorkers is able to source and hire people with not only data entry skills, but also skills and capability in supporting clients with their accounting, finance and HR requirements.
Hidden costs get exposed, budgeting becomes accurate
Support functions, as they are often not tracked as stringently by management, have a tendency to hide costs and inefficiencies in their dark recesses. Handing them over to a vendor serves the purpose of airing them out and hanging them to dry in bright sunlight. All dampness gets sucked out and a bright light shines on every part of the process. Endemic inefficiencies of the system now have no place to hide. Once outsourced, inefficiencies, if any, would be handled by the vendor, whose business interest lies in doing the work most efficiently. All organizations operate on the principles of
budgeting whereby a financial projection is made for the accounting period and the actual performance, as it happens, mapped against it. Outsourcing medical billing data entry will serve to make the budgetary process more accurate by making the costs associated with it transparent and defined, apart from ironing out earlier inefficiencies. The outsourcing organization will get this benefit when they outsource to oWorkers.
People Management
One of the greatest challenges in running an organization is managing people. People are intelligent. They think. They have feelings and emotions. They have different styles of working. They have good and bad days and periods. They have expectations. All the traits that make human beings the most intelligent species on the planet also make them a challenge to manage. Much organizational time and energy is consumed in managing people related issues and setting policy for them. Manual processing organizations, as the term indicates, rely on people for their work, and could have lots of employees. As would the processing sections in a healthcare organization. Outsourcing the data entry manual processing section shifts the manpower management responsibility to the vendor. The client no longer has to worry about getting the work done if someone goes absent, or hiring in a hurry if someone leaves. These are cares that will be handled by the vendor who, incidentally, has much greater expertise and experience in doing so, as it presumably does the same for other clients whose projects are also staffed by resources that are similar in background. Being a preferred employer gives oWorkers the benefit of a continuous flow of walk-in candidates interested in a job. This keeps our hiring costs low as we don’t need to advertise for hiring. Moreover, in an industry notorious for attrition, it enables us to hire replacements in a short time. We engage employees the traditional way, as employees, and not as freelancers or contractors as some of our competitors now do. It enjoins greater responsibility on us, of paying social taxes on their behalf, of managing their careers and growth, but we are happy to do that for our staff
Scalability
All businesses and organizations face uncertainty in demand and supply against projections. While at times one may need to keep ide; resources at hand to cater to sudden spikes in demand, it is never a preferred option. The organization would rather create additional capacity at short notice and cater to sudden spikes. Outsourcing data entry can relieve the client of the pressure of at least one type of resource if demand rises suddenly. This can be built into the arrangement with the provider. A provider, with the benefit of multiple projects of a similar nature running simultaneously, can possibly align resources for a short period such that the peak is catered without a significant impact on others. Of course, with larger combined volumes, they can also keep hiring arrangements in place that enable them to hire at short notice and for short periods. oWorkers provides the leverage to be able to hire for peaks and troughs. It can hire an extra one hundred people within 48 hours, if required, reducing the burden on the client to carry staffing at peak volume levels through the year.
Timeliness of work
Though speed depends on the nature of work, the speed of work in a support system in a healthcare environment might not always be a priority. Priority is likely to be reserved for healthcare related work, and even more preferentially, work with patients. Though it depends on the nature of work, BPO providers doing data entry provide great flexibility to clients. Some might come at an additional cost, though. They can provide overnight turnaround for clients on the other side of the globe. They can run an operation 24×7 if the work so demands. They can even operate from the premises of the client, if that is a critical requirement. All in all, they are willing to go the extra mile to make it work for the organization. In all its three centers around the world, oWorkers has the capability of running 24×7 operations for clients who need it and are willing to pay for it
Multi Lingual capability
The world is shrinking and businesses are becoming global. Businesses operate across countries, time zones and languages. The support engine of a business needs to be able to cater to a variety of languages in order to cover its geographical spread. The organization should not need to look for yet another vendor for each language. When you outsource medical billing data entry to oWorkers, you get a provider with proficiency in 22 languages commonly spoken around the world, across the three delivery centers it operates from. Whether you are a local business or a global behemoth, oWorkers has the solutions for you.
