The offshore – onshore relay race – The case for collaboration in revenue cycle outsourcing programs
The offshore-onshore relay race refers to the collaboration between the onshore operations of your medical billing company or in-house RCM team and offshore (foreign) providers of revenue cycle services across processes such as medical billing, medical coding, patient access, accounts receivable, and denial management. Collaboration can increase efficiency and improve financial and business outcomes.
By designing your outsourcing program clearly, you can improve sharing of best practices and expertise, integrate technologies, and reduce effort and overall costs. Onshore operations and offshore providers both stand to gain in collaborating to design a more effective program anchored on technology and process redesign.
The Importance of Service Provider - Client Collaboration
Service providers can collaborate with clients to achieve better revenue cycle results by taking the following steps:
Understanding client needs: Service providers need to understand the client’s business objectives, pain points, and requirements for their revenue cycle services. One may think that outsourcing the processes to the service provider makes them aware of your changing needs. Your objectives are constantly changing, and so are your expectations from your service provider. Set a process for helping the service provider understand your requirements on an ongoing basis.
Clear communication: Regular communication between service providers and clients is critical to ensuring their goals and expectations are aligned. A cadence of daily, weekly, and monthly communication can help resolve differences before they get out of control.
Joint process improvement: Continuous improvement is one of the most important aspects to focus on and evolve your outsourcing program. Service providers and revenue cycle outsourcers should work on defining the continuous improvement agenda to increase efficiency and accuracy.
Technology integration: Look for opportunities to integrate technologies to streamline revenue cycle processes, reduce the effort of service providers, and reduce manual errors.
Performance tracking: Service providers and clients should establish regular performance tracking mechanisms to monitor the effectiveness of their revenue cycle services and identify areas for further improvement.
By collaborating with their clients, service providers can provide more tailored and effective revenue cycle services, resulting in improved financial performance for their clients.
The importance of governance in improving buyer- service provider collaboration
Governance plays a critical role in ensuring outsourcing success by establishing a framework for decision-making, risk management, and monitoring the performance of outsourcing relationships. Critical aspects of governance in outsourcing include:
Clear policies and procedures: Defining clear policies and procedures for the outsourced program to ensure you can manage your outsourcing relationships consistently and effectively.
Regular performance monitoring: Regular monitoring of outsourcing relationships helps to identify and resolve any issues that may arise and ensures that performance targets are being met.
The cadence of meetings. Establish governance at multiple levels – operational, management, and strategic. A set of daily, weekly, and monthly meetings will help you achieve the requisite collaboration to achieve business outcomes.
Risk management: Governance should include a comprehensive risk management framework to identify, assess, and mitigate the risks associated with outsourcing.
Contract management: Effective contract management ensures that outsourcing agreements are aligned with business goals, comply with legal requirements, and deliver the expected outcomes.
Monitoring performance: Outsourcers should monitor supplier performance regularly and provide feedback to suppliers on their strengths and areas for improvement. By using collaborative workflows, you can get real-time reports of your inventory and business outcomes.
Continuous improvement: Outsourcers should work with their suppliers to continuously improve the outsourcing relationship and identify opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Stakeholder engagement: Effective governance requires engagement and collaboration with stakeholders, including senior management, outsourcing partners, and internal departments, to ensure that outsourcing relationships are aligned with business objectives and delivering value.
By establishing effective governance, organizations can ensure that their outsourcing relationships are well managed, deliver the desired outcomes, and support their overall business success.
Transformational outsourcing requires great collaboration. Ask us how we make outsourcing programs successful. Reach us:
