BUSINESS

The doctor is outsourcing: To hire or not to hire

You can employ a service to handle about any staff task or duty your office needs. But should you?

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Aug. 11, 2003.

Many physicians hire someone outside the office to handle billing and transcription, but you don't have to stop there. Just about anything can be outsourced -- from watering plants, copying medical records, filing and coding to practice management, technology, collection, payroll, employee benefits administration and even nursing.

But should you outsource any or all of those functions?

That depends on your personality, practice size and priorities, said Jennifer Bever, an associate at Karen Zupko & Associates, a Chicago-based consulting firm.

Outsourcing can save money and offer access to a higher level of professional expertise and service that doctors couldn't afford to hire or find on their own, observers say. It also can let doctors shift the hassles associated with a specific function to somebody else, freeing them to practice and generate revenue, said Michael Weinstein, MD, a gastroenterologist at 12-doctor Metropolitan Gastroenterology in Washington, D.C.

But outsourcing also can be risky.

"The downside is you can lose control," said Louis Korman, MD, one of Dr. Weinstein's partners. "You can be taken. There are a lot of people who think that doctors' practices are just money mills they can take advantage of."

To prevent that from happening, Dr. Korman's group, which outsources practice management, technology and billing, spells out in its contracts what benchmarks the companies providing those services must meet and regularly monitors their performance.

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