The outsourcing industry received its biggest bonanza yet with the US healthcare bill being passed by the House of Representatives. Theopportunity that it throws up for outsourcers is huge and far bigger than the Y2K, which included only changing code, said experts. When the bill becomes law, it will bring around 32 million more Americans under insurance cover, pushing healthcare providers and insurance firms to become more efficient and opening up demand for less-expensive services, better technology and business intelligence.
“The opportunity is not at a company-level but at an industry level,” said Milan Sheth, partner, Ernst & Young, indicating the scale of opportunities that is expected to unfold over the next 10 years. Nearly all top IT firms and BPOs have been anticipating the move and preparing for it by pursuing contracts and acquisitions giving them a footprint the US healthcare provider and insurance segment, estimated at around $ 30 billion.
A significant amount of business will come from enrollments, claims processing and providing customer services with technology and tools helping insurance providers get more customer insights and price their products appropriately. “Universal access to insurance increases the risk to insurance providers, forcing them to become more efficient by lowering costs,” said Suresh Ramani, COO, Intelenet Global Services, a BPO provider. From no revenues from healthcare providers and payers, Intelenet now gets 10% of its revenues from this segment.
Mumbai-headquartered IT services provider, Patni Computer Systems, announced a strategic deal with a US-based healthcare insurance provider that involved taking over part of its operations in El Paso, US, only last week. “Patni sees significant healthcare outsourcing opportunity both in IT and BPO areas. The additional enrollees will need to be administered and this means a lot more work in areas of claims processing, enrollments, underwriting support, customer support et al for insurance carriers, which is outsourced to companies such as Patni,” said Sanjiv Kapur, senior VP and head – BPO, Patni.
“There will be increased volumes both on the provider and payer side. It is a big positive for us because the big part of what we do is eligibility services, where we assess eligibility and enrol people into medicare programmes… I expect a bulk of business to come in 2014,” said Ananda Mukherji, CEO, Firstsource Solutions, which will gain from its MedAssist acquisition done in 2007. This kind of opportunity will require players to also have an onshore presence, in some cases, because of regulatory requirements and in others, because of the high-end processing involved, said industry executives. A few like Firstsource and Cbay already have an onshore presence and while others are building it.
Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ITeS/Opportunity-comes-knocking-on-outsourcing-firms-doors/articleshow/5713526.cms
