6 Healthcare Outsourcing Trends To Watch Out For
Outsourcing in healthcare has transitioned from a forward-thinking strategy to a standard practice. In the United States, over 90% of hospitals now outsource at least one of their IT services, for example. This widespread adoption demonstrates the importance of outsourcing in modern healthcare facilities.
The healthcare landscape and patient expectations are constantly changing, and so are the trends in healthcare outsourcing services. Staying updated with these trends is crucial if you want to enhance the operations and patient care at your healthcare facility.
We’re here to guide you through the top six healthcare outsourcing trends, providing you with the insights needed to keep your facility at the forefront of healthcare management.
How Does Outsourcing in Healthcare Work?
Healthcare outsourcing is the process of delegating non-clinical tasks to external business process outsourcing (BPO) providers. This can include anything from administrative duties like billing and appointment scheduling to specialized functions such as IT services and infrastructure management.
When you partner with a BPO provider for healthcare outsourcing services, you gain access to a global talent pool of healthcare practitioners and the latest technology. This helps you to reduce costs, ensure operational efficiency, and allow your staff to focus more on patient care and less on backend processes. This strategic partnership allows you to adapt quickly to healthcare industry changes while maintaining a high standard of patient care.
6 Healthcare Outsourcing Trends
Outsourced healthcare services are influenced by industry challenges, technological innovations, and evolving patient needs. This dynamic approach allows healthcare outsourcing to continuously deliver up-to-date and effective services, ensuring your healthcare facility can adapt in an ever-changing environment.
Here are six healthcare outsourcing trends that transforming how healthcare facilities operate:
1. Enhanced Focus on Patient Care
Patients today expect more personalized and attentive care, making it a priority for healthcare facilities to meet these expectations. This trend reflects a broader shift towards patient-centered care models, where the emphasis is on the quality of care and ensuring patient satisfaction.
Outsourced healthcare services are aligning with this industry trend by increasing patient support services, such as 24/7 call centers and appointment scheduling. These services ensure patients have continuous access to care and support, enhancing their overall experience with your healthcare facility. By outsourcing these functions, you can streamline your healthcare operations while ensuring that your patients receive the high-quality care they need and expect.
2. Increased Adoption of Remote Patient Monitoring
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is a technology that allows you to monitor patient’s health data in real time without the need for the patient to be physically present in your healthcare facility. The adoption of RPM is increasing because it offers a convenient way for patients to receive care, especially for those with chronic conditions or limited access to traditional healthcare services.
Outsourced healthcare services offer comprehensive RPM solutions, including the monitoring of RPM devices and patient health data. These services allow you to easily integrate RPM into your patient care strategy, allowing for continuous monitoring and early intervention when necessary.
3. Expansion of Telehealth Support
Telehealth support involves using digital communication tools, like patient portals and video conferencing software, to deliver healthcare services and information remotely. Recent global health challenges like the COVID-19 Pandemic and evolving patient needs for accessible healthcare have pushed the widespread adoption of telehealth support in healthcare facilities.
To keep up with the expanding role of telehealth, outsourced healthcare services are enhancing their service offerings and telehealth platforms. These platforms enable your healthcare facility to conduct virtual consultations, monitor patient health remotely, and provide a wide range of telehealth services efficiently.
4. Continued Healthcare Worker Shortages
Healthcare worker shortages are a worldwide problem. In the United States, there is a widespread shortage of healthcare professionals, including physicians, nurses, and midwives. These industry challenges are placing pressure on healthcare facilities to maintain operational efficiency and high standards of patient care.
Healthcare outsourcing offers a solution to the growing trend of worker shortages. With a healthcare BPO provider, you can outsource an extensive range of healthcare tasks, from medical claims processing to payroll to data analysis. Outsourcing allows you to alleviate the strain on your in-house staff, ensuring that patient care remains a top priority without overburdening existing workers.
5. Digitizing Patient Experience
The transition towards a digitized patient experience is being driven by the broader digital transformation across industries. Patients want immediate access to their health information, convenient online payment methods, and simple ways to schedule appointments. Healthcare facilities that offer digital tools and platforms can meet this expectation and offer a streamlined patient experience.
Outsourced healthcare services are key to digitizing your patient experience. BPO providers offer advanced technology solutions and expertise to digitize various patient interactions, such as patient portals and electronic health records. These digitization solutions all you to make health information and your services more accessible to patients.
6. Increasing Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI adoption is increasing across industries, and healthcare is no exception. The widespread usage of AI is driven by its ability to efficiently process and analyze vast amounts of data. In healthcare, AI is being used to enhance diagnostic accuracy, personalize treatment plans, and improve patient outcomes by analyzing complex medical data and identifying patterns.
Outsourcing partners are incorporating AI to provide predictive analytics, automate tasks, and enable you to make quicker, more informed decisions. With outsourcing, you can adopt the AI trend without the need for deep technological expertise, ensuring that your facility remains competitive.
FAQs About Healthcare Outsourcing Trends
Is outsourcing a growing trend in healthcare?
Outsourcing is a growing trend in the healthcare sector due to advancing technology, changing patient expectations, and industry challenges. More and more healthcare facilities are choosing to outsource to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the patient experience.
What is the future of outsourcing in healthcare?
The future of outsourcing will be shaped by growing demand and technological innovation. For healthcare facilities, utilizing healthcare process outsourcing services will be key to accessing specialized skills and technologies to optimize service delivery and patient care.
What industries outsource the most?
Healthcare, retail, logistics, and finance are some of the top industries that utilize business process outsourcing (BPO). The most outsourced services are IT support and customer services.
