Health care data outsourcing expanding beyond transcription

THE COUNTRY’S outsourcing services for health care information management will increasingly rely on other fields for growth besides medical transcription, which has been the focus of this segment of business process outsourcing (BPO) for the past 10 years, an industry official told reporters yesterday.

Myla Rose M. Reyes, president of both the Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing Association of the Philippines (HIMOAP) and the Medical Transcription Industry Association of the Philippines, Inc. said outsourced health information management jobs have expanded to other areas like medical coding, medical billing, information technology support and claims processing.

“Medical centers in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and other countries are outsourcing services beyond medical transcription,” Ms. Reyes said.

“There is a growing need for companies that can handle information technology development for solutions that will support electronic medical records to communicate across all health care system platforms,” she explained.

While Ms. Reyes could not provide historical industry revenue data, saying HIMOAP is now collating first-half information from both members and non-members, she noted that the domestic industry earned about $89 million last year against a global value of some $19 billion.

“Technology is constantly reshaping the health care market landscape which we have barely begun to explore,” Ms. Reyes said.

“The initial target these remaining months of the year for the Philippines is a 5% market share globally or… over 100,000 jobs for Filipinos,” she added.

As a result of growing business opportunities, she said the industry now has 12,000 workers from 1,200 workers when it started in 2001.

Still, this means the health care information management outsourcing segment remains a nascent, emerging industry, now accounting for just 3% of the country’s 400,000 BPO work force.

Ms. Reyes said that the industry gives alternative career options to allied health care professionals and fresh graduates such as nurses and care givers.

“They might be doing something that is not what they have finished in school, but definitely related to their field,” Ms. Reyes said.

“The increased demand for electronic health care [sic] opens up huge career opportunities for nursing and allied medical professionals for medical coding, PHI [protected health information] entry and management, disease management and patient education and other services related to the administrative functions of a hospital, a home for the aged and other medical centers,” she added.

But Ms. Reyes cited as a key hurdle to growing this “new BPO branch” is the lack of a law that will, among others, ensure the security of information gathered and processed in this field, and thus attract more clients from abroad. — A. M. P. Dagcutan, Businessworld