Benefits of Getting Your Medical Coding Done by a Specialized Provider

Rising healthcare costs and data confidentiality are major concerns for any healthcare organisation.Healthcare organisations like corporate-style large hospitals, institutions, and their staff take the help ofhealthcare BPO services provider companies to collect, collate, disseminate and analyse data, time-consuming non-core activity for them, within a quick turnaround time. This outsourcing of non-core activity will allow large hospitals to focus more on core activities like providing top-notch quality critical care to patients under their supervision. This helps corporate style large hospitals and institutions to facilitate better resource allocation, simplify their processes, and boost their revenue through cost optimisation.

What is Medical Coding & Its Importance

Medical coding plays an integral part in medical insurance reimbursement. Medical coding allots a unique code for each diagnosis and medical procedure done on a patient. Translation of diagnosis and procedures into universal codes allows healthcare providers to process their hospital bills correctly.

Medical coding allows patients visiting a hospital, care centre or other medical facilities to have their information documented. It ensures that patients are not forced to pay more for a procedure than they have to and that their insurance providers are charged the correct amount only for the services provided. As such, deploying the assistance of specialised healthcare BPO service providers holds many benefits.

Benefits of Medical Coding by Specialised Providers

1. Up-to-Date Certifications

Medical coding done by specialised providers helps hospitals keep up-to-date to the coding system, rules and regulations and best practices. Keeping up with regular updates requires hospitals to invest significant time and resources. Hospitals outsource this work to healthcare BPO services providers to ensure that all codes are up-to-date, leaving hospital authorities to concentrate on critical activities like patient care.

2. Consistent Staff

Hospitals are mainly concerned with providing patient care. Suppose they have to keep a small in-house coding team to update medical codes for their patients, which is a non-core activity. In that case, they will be overloaded to meet the coding needs of thousands of patients, leading to huge backlogs in coding and subsequent delays in payment. Also, the hospitals have to hire employees outside their target pool of medical health caregivers, which is inconsistent with their staffing targets.

On the other hand, a healthcare BPO service has a large staff of medical coders, who are well versed with medical codes and have the necessary skills and specialisation, their sole job is to create medical codes for each procedure a patient goes through, and quality of the job done is consistent with their profile. These coders get the job done promptly, allowing hospitals to process payments due from patients.

3. Cost-Effectiveness

Outsourcing medical coding services works by hospitals to healthcare BPO services providers is more cost-effective than hiring and maintaining a small in-house team of medical coders. Employing medical coders with specialisations and skills for a non-core activity can be expensive. After hiring, they need to be trained, supervised, and licensed, which are additional costs hospitals will have to bear.

Hospitals can outsource medical coding work to specialised service providers, which is their primary focus and as such, hire, train, supervise, licence staff as per their requirement. Also, specialised services providers pick medical coders from their target pool of hireable employees, which is specific and targeted. This saves hospitals a lot of money as they always want to concentrate on their core patient care activity, and these additional costs can be instead invested in providing patient care.

4. Flexibility and Scalability

Outsourcing medical coding work to specialised healthcare BPO services providers affords hospitals more flexibility and scalability than hiring an in-house medical coding team. Hiring additional employees is a long process, and employing them post-training requires expenses on infrastructure setup that due to non-core will remain small and will not enjoy the same focus as the core activity of patient care. 

Outsourcing medical coding to specialised service providers allows hospitals the flexibility to concentrate on a core activity, and service providers can scale their team up or down as per hospitals’ requirements. They can assign more employees to complete that work on time without hiring new ones, so hospitals do not have to face delays in submitting claims and receiving payments. Because of the flexibility that outsourcing medical coding work provides, the quality and accuracy of records are always the same as they have dedicated staff to maintain the quality and accuracy of data, unlike hospitals for whom hiring quality checkers for a non-core activity is a waste of time and money.

5. Transparency

For hospitals, patient care is a core activity, and medical coding is non-core. Expecting them to maintain transparency in such activities is nearly impossible. On the other hand, outsourcing medical coding to healthcare BPO services providers ensures transparency in work, with these companies being able to provide detailed records as and when required. Also, since it is their core activity, the performance reports on their medical coding work can be delivered to hospitals as and when needed, giving hospitals a complete picture of how they work on medical coding without having to invest time and money in keeping and maintaining medical coding records or supervising staff.

6. Security and Compliance

Security of patient records and compliance with regulations like HIPAA and other regulations is a major concern for all healthcare organisations. Regarding medical coding, hospitals will need to take robust data security measures and have requisite disaster recovery measures in place to protect against data loss and other incidents like cyber-attacks, ransomware, spam and phishing in case they operate a medical coding department, which is a non-core activity.

A medical coding service provider, on the contrary, will take necessary measures for the work outsourced to them to ensure security and compliance concerns are met related to medical coding records as part of their core activity.

Conclusion

Outsourcing medical coding work to healthcare BPO services providers will allow hospitals to concentrate on patient care which is a core activity for them. It helps hospitals update records, maintain consistency in the scope of work, ensure transparency, security and compliance without actually having to invest in setting up infrastructure to hire, train, certify staff, something medical coding companies do as part of their core activity. Most importantly, it helps hospitals cut costs and boost their revenues to invest more in patient care.