Healthcare Outsourcing

Though unexpected to be on such a hike, healthcare outsourcing has turned out to be a major contribution to the outsourcing sector, as well to the offshore sites. The healthcare industry today is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing industries.

Consuming over 10 percent of gross domestic product of most developed nations, health care can form an enormous part of a country's economy.

Healthcare is the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical, nursing, and allied health professions.

Medical Tourism has been an age old phenomena in the West and has been supported by highly-developed indigenous health care systems and constant improvements in technology and has thus resulted in to HealthCare Outsourcing.

By upgrading the technology, gaining greater familiarity with latest medical protocols and improving the image in terms of quality and cost, the HealthCare Outsourcing industry in countries like India and Thailand are attracting a global clientele to emerge as the contemporary best medical-tourism destinations.

HealthCare Outsourcing services include:
1. CPOE Solutions
2. Care Design
3. Case Management
4. Electronic Medical Records
5. HIPAA Solutions
6. Healthcare Management Consulting
7. Medical Animation
8. Medical Billing and Collections
9. Medical Claims Adjudication
10. Medical Claims Processing
11. Medical Coding
12. Medical Transcription
13. Medication Management
14. Medico-legal Litigation Support
15. Patient Safety Services
16. Revenue Cycle Consulting
17. Telemedicine
18. Tele-radiology Services
19. Travel Medicine
20. X-Ray Film Scanning

There are private health care centers that offer sophisticated medical services, comparable to and at times even better than those offered by developed countries. A recent market study forecasts a growth from US$ 18.7 billion to around US$ 45 billion equivalent to 8.5 per cent of GDP by 2012. India has emerged as the leading country promoting HealthCare Outsourcing.

India's Outsourcing HealthCare industry along with its Information Technology and Tourism Sector has helped it move into the economic renaissance. It is poised to become a major driver of economic growth as first-world patients, driven out of their own systems by high costs and crowded conditions, look for cheaper places for medical care.

The Government of India provides Tourist Visa of short duration and a special Medical Tourism Visa (M) of longer duration for patients. Patients are also provided Visa for their accompanying spouse coming to India for Medical Treatment. New terms such as such as Health Tourism, HealthCare Outsourcing and medical back office support have gained good popularity in the nation.

Medical tourism in India is a business that has been estimated to be worth $2 billion by 2012. What has been termed as "International Patient Care" is already gaining pace in the nation.

Private health care units are constantly improvising their health infrastructure and attracting a regular stream of international patients by appending alluring benefits to their package. This seems quite reasonable given the rising costs of treatment in western countries along with increasing demands of an ageing population.

Costs of advanced surgeries in India are 10-15 times lower than anywhere in the world that attracts patients from abroad to avail a host of arrangements at an easily affordable rate. A typical package includes air travel, local transportation, translation services, five-star accommodation for the patient and also for accompanying spouse or relative in many cases, together with their personalized choice of global cuisine.

A Healthcare Outsource vendor's service can increase systemic capacity to trap claim edits. The vendor can apply uniform code-sets across multiple systems, enforce privacy and security compliance or enhance the capabilities of the first party systems, for the processing of new products.

A Healthcare Outsource vendor brings complete expertise of business rules for adjudication processes with industry practices. All these services adhere to mandatory and standard code sets.

A Healthcare Outsource vendor's experience base- spans across a variety of claims such as an individual physician, institutional, behavioral health, pharmacy and dental standard assurances.