Healthcare BPO moves up the value ladder

The local healthcare business process outsourcing sector is steadily going up the value chain, going beyond medical transcription, and is now ready to provide jobs to 86,000 nurses from now to end-2016.

According to Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing Association of the Philippines president Myla Reyes, many local BPO firms were already providing high-value services such as clinical coding, disease management, utilization reviews, revenue cycle management, and pharmaceutical benefits management.

“We’re doing some of these already. A lot of the locators are coming here because of the talent pool,” Ms. Reyes said in an interview.

While the majority of the healthcare BPO services provided in-country was still medical transcription, Reyes said BPO players were now offering more high-value services than before.

The healthcare segment, she said, was poised to become another shining star in the BPO sector.

“We’re now just a small part of the BPO industry, but if we do things right, we have the potential to grow to as big as the call center industry,” Reyes said.

She said that as of end-2010, the healthcare BPO sector provided 14,000 jobs, all for frontliners such as medical transcriptionists and agents who answer patient queries over the phone. Revenues reached $94 million.

With the healthcare BPO sector now in expansion and consolidation mode, Reyes said it had the capacity to absorb at least 86,000 jobs over the next five years, for an industry total of 100,000 employees by end-2016.

By the end of this year, the number of employees in the healthcare BPO sector should reach about 28,000, she said.

In terms of revenue, Reyes said the industry was targeting to corner 6-8 percent of the $3 billion to $4 billion potential market, from United States-based clients alone, within five years.

Reforms in the US healthcare sector opened doors of opportunity for BPO service providers in the country, she said, as more companies in the US were expected to outsource work to third-party service providers.

The Philippines had the potential to corner a large chunk of this market someday because of its highly skilled, English-speaking, and caring workforce, she said.