Emerging Opportunities in Medical Outsourcing
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios


Defined Tag: Medical Outsourcing.

Medical outsourcing is a business decision, often made by hospitals, healthcare or pharmaceutical companies, to cut expenses and focus on core competences. Usually, outsourcing involves off-shoring the non-core functions to developing nations, either by hiring overseas subcontractors or setting up a subdivision of the company overseas, in an area where there is no dearth of qualified manpower and lower wages. Thus, the direct and immediate advantage of outsourcing is cost reduction, reliability and quicker turn around time

Till recently, medical transcription services formed the bulk of medical outsourcing. Medical transcription is an IT enabled service (ITeS) that requires focused listening skills and using specialized software in converting the voice dictation or audio data of physicians (located in US) consisting of patient history and medical advice, into electronic text form or documents. Countries like India, Philippines, Israel and Brazil are favored for such services because of the time-zone differences. Indian companies in particular, offer extremely competitive rates for relatively similar or better services. This results in huge savings for hospitals and healthcare companies who bolster their revenues by off-shoring.

These days, the ambit of medical outsourcing has widened to include services like medical billing, medical coding, claims processing, billing, and remote medical assistance or medical help desk. This outsourcing is a $200-billion business worldwide. Giving the spiraling healthcare costs, hospitals and laboratories in U.S. and Europe find it cheaper to outsource laboratory tests and other medical processes to developing countries, thereby slashing costs up to seventy percent.

The most-talked about opportunity in medical outsourcing is conducting clinical trials and research in developing countries like India. With the ever-rising drug research costs in Europe and the U.S., more and more healthcare companies are outsourcing clinical trials in such countries where government oversight is more lax and research can be concluded for a fraction of the cost. Indian companies like Ranbaxy and Dr Reddy also conduct clinical research and data analysis for multinationals like Pfizer, Novartis and Eli Lilly. Equally emerging opportunities in the healthcare sector exist in areas like telemedicine, telepathology, teleradiology, clinical data management and disease management.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, Amazon, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.