Medical Outsourcing Services are Going Global

The outsourcing of medical services enables patients to get the best medical attention from specialized doctors. State and federal legislation ensure that the doctors providing these medical outsourcing services have been properly trained and licensed. Without proper documentation and permission, the doctors are not allowed to render medical outsourcing services. This has been touted as the most promising yet contentious area of outsourcing. The services that can be outsourced could be anything from keying in transcriptions of the treatment records into structured documents to physically sending the patients to another country for treatment.

Medical services have been outsourced due to the shortage of specialists who can do the job in the country. Medical outsourcing services are enthusiastically welcomed, with some of it being done in India and elsewhere because it saves them from long hours of work.

India is particularly favoured for such medical outsourcing services because of the time zone differences. Other countries providing such services are Australia, Switzerland, Israel and Brazil. These countries are also equipped with the latest technology, which allows radiologists to read images from far-flung places. Remote medical services like radiology and clinical services are also being outsourced. Clinical services include oncology, orthopaedic services, molecular imaging and disease management. Outsourcing radiology not only involves substantial cost savings, but also ensures timely diagnosis and treatment for patients. The saving of time is a critical factor and outsourcing medical services leads to reduced workload pressure on radiologists, faster turn around time for patients, and cost savings.

India is fast becoming the main hub to outsource medical services. Not only does India have talented pool of medical professionals but also the latest medical technologies and techniques. Outsourcing teleradiology to India gives access to innovative solutions, which have helped improve an unwieldy clinical process. Competent and trained professionals, time zone advantages and in-built quality advantages are some of the advantages of outsourcing medical services. Other services include using the service of radiologists at a remote but competitive country to interpret scan images such as CT or MRI. Blood and urine samples of patients are also now sent to India for pathology tests to cut cost. The labs conduct the test and the results that are uploaded back. Another growing area of outsourcing is bioinformatics and biotechnology. The outsourcing of medical services also ranges from data analysis to basic research.