The US healthcare reform announced by the president Barack Obama has thrown huge opportunities for Indian BPO, KPO, ITeS, revenue cycle management, electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR) companies as healthcare providers in US are facing a tough time to meet the deadline.
Apart from huge demand for healthcare outsourcing professionals, particularly coding and billing professionals, requirement for professional in EMR implementation and RCM will be huge, said a research done by ValueNotes, a leading consultancy tracking the IT industry in India.
The Obama administration has been spearheading several changes to the US healthcare system. Cost pressures along with the after-effects of the recent economic meltdown have triggered major reforms intended to control healthcare costs and provide universal coverage. The reform, enacted in 2009-10, poses significant challenges for healthcare providers including a potential increase (estimated to be about 30 million) in the volume of records driven by rise in the number of insured people.
Others include need to identify, test and adopt electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR), obtain certification and demonstrate their meaningful use by 2014 and the need to upgrade all revenue cycle management (RCM) recording systems.
There are also significant outsourcing opportunities resulting from code and standard updates that healthcare providers need to meet by the stipulated deadlines. RCM vendors in India can help the end clients meet HIPAA 5010 and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) conversion upgrades. For example, healthcare providers (or even large US-based RCM vendors) will need to outsource to companies who can help them implement ICD version 9 to 10 conversions on a large scale by October 2013. Indian vendors, especially large and mid-sized RCM vendors, can cash in on this opportunity as they have the advantages of cost effective infrastructure, established position to move up from base level jobs like transcription to higher RCM jobs, ample scalable workforce and volume absorption capacity, the research said.
Similarly, US healthcare reform and the resultant challenges for the industry are creating a window of unique opportunities for IT vendors. For example, implementation and maintenance of EMR/EHR systems is reportedly a $20 billion IT outsourcing opportunity.