GeBBS Healthcare Blog

A Professional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Partnership Can Help You To Be Prepared for Natural Disasters like Hurricane Sandy.

No one could have predicted the magnitude of the recent devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy across the eastern part of our nation. CNN reports that "at least 81 people in the United States and two in Canada have died as a result of Sandy, raising the storm's overall death toll to 150. It earlier claimed 67 lives in the Caribbean. But the struggle toward normalcy ramped up Thursday, as authorities in nine states tallied worked to restore basic services like public transit and electricity.  About 4.9 million customers across the eastern United States were still in the dark early Thursday, down from the nearly 8 million who lost power shortly after the storm hit".

The landscape of the healthcare industry is dominated by attempts to manage rising medical costs. At the same time, healthcare organizations must respond to demands for an increasingly higher quality of service. Lingering manual processes and disparate systems have fostered an environment of process inefficiencies. Hospitals are realizing that they cannot keep up with the requirements for improved levels of patient care and manage their IT, thus they must turn towards outsourcing as an option to address these requirements.

The federal government spends around $1 trillion a year on health care programs. Different communities — the elderly, the disabled, military and civilian federal employees, low-income individuals and their families, and others — benefit from these programs. The two largest programs are Medicare and Medicaid.

The healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM) is just beginning to feel the effects of consumerism as employers focus on containing healthcare costs. This means that today’s growing financial pressures on healthcare organizations will continue to escalate as consumers bear an increased financial responsibility for their healthcare costs.

Hospitals are under pressure to collect various streams of revenue — due to lower Medicare, Medicaid and commercial payor reimbursements — in order to stay solvent, maintain a requisite cash flow and keep revenue figures stable. Credit rating agencies and a hospitals' own internal financial management teams know that cash is king right now, and the revenue cycle teams have to overcome the contemporary obstacles to keep a steady cash and revenue flow.