Adam Smith, the renowned economist, in his ‘The Wealth of Nations’ says, of self-sufficiency vs. outsourcing, "Rather than having each household produce most of its own food and supplies, specializing and exchanging with other individuals would give access to more and better produce. Likewise, international free trade would enable each nation to specialize in what its citizens could produce relatively better and more cheaply."

Effectively, outsourcing is the modern day progression of an idea that has always existed in trade, but has found new application with the advancement and adoption of new technologies.

Applied to the area of medical services, as healthcare organizations and providers grow in size and operations, it becomes imperative that their focus be directed to their core activities (patient care) while non-core functions (like transcription and billing) are contracted out or outsourced to organizations which specialize in that particular function. This allows medical providers to do things a lot more efficiently and enables them to do more with less.

With the daily challenges of managing patient information and stringent regulations, managing a full medical transcription staff also puts a strain on the time and resources of a medical organization. Outsourcing medical transcription work in such a scenario is not only immensely beneficial, but also comes with a few other advantages that are not possible with in-house transcription. Listed below are a few of these benefits.

1 Lower Capital Investment & Equipment Expenses

When you outsource your medical transcription requirements, you no longer have to own or maintain a dictation system, a typing platform or worry about upgrading your equipment. Your capital expenses on maintenance with the average maintenance agreement can cost upwards of 10% of equipment costs, annually. Maintaining an in-house transcription team also places certain office equipment and space expenses which are removed by outsourcing.

2 Turnaround time guarantees & Volume fluctuations

While the number of documents generated by a healthcare organization averages out across months, on a daily basis document volume can fluctuate heavily because of dictation frequency and patient volume. This not only increases management overhead but also delays transcription more often than not. With a medical transcription vendor, you are provided with guarantees on turnaround time so that patient documents are never delayed. This removes the need for you to set document priority based on the criticality and urgency of a document and ensures that all documents are available when you need them.

3 Reduced management overheads

The amount of time needed to manage medical transcription in-house can be a large overhead when you consider tasks like managing dictations, allocating transcription work, setting document priority and maintaining archives of audio and documents. Outsourcing reduces these overheads effectively improving efficiency in other areas.

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next