Outsourcing as a Pro or Con

Outsourcing to reach health care strategic goals has its pros and cons. The benefit (pro) is in contracting with other organizations or companies to do a particular function, such as customer service needs or with the purpose of partnering with call centers to handle its patient billing and collections, while it focuses on the overall health and care of its patients and the organization needs. If health care’s strategic goals are to achieve greater efficiencies, concentrate on the core business of health care and expands its organizational flexibility then that would be a pro. There is also a growing interest with the insurance companies and payers to utilize offshore hospitals. The idea is to work at educating payers with programs that would allow patients to travel abroad to receive treatment that would be quality yet affordable. This type of outsourcing is also thought to be a pro for health insurance payers.

However, beneficial there are negatives (con) to everything. There is the concern for security risks in areas of a lack of sufficient training in outsourced areas; as well as the mismanagement of drugs. There are security risks to vital patient information when untrained workers handle patient information tarnishing a company’s image by violating HIPAA laws. However, “human resources can help to reduce these problems with outsourcing by having a role in determining how workers are selected, the type of training they receive, the criteria used to reward employees (for instance, quantity versus quality), how new employees are socialized through the orientation program, efficient monitoring systems, and the like” (Gomez-Mejfa, Balkin, & Cardy, 2010, Chapter 17, International Human Resource Challenge).

Gomez-Mejfa, L., Balkin, D. B., & Cardy, R. (2010). Managing Human Resources (6th ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collection.