The medical staff services department has a significant role in any healthcare system: provide high-quality service, compliance, and efficiency to management functions as well as be a resource for senior administration and leadership on accreditation and other regulatory matters. Achieving this mission leads to the following for healthcare providers:
- More revenue and predictable cost management
- Better quality of service and physician satisfaction
- Lower risk profile by meeting compliance goals
If this mission isn't being fulfilled "in house," leadership must figure out why this is happening and how to fix it. A common reason that an internal medical staff fails to meet its mission is not enough cash flow to support such an internal team. Other practices and hospitals might need to hire new employees, or maybe they need more specialized personnel to achieve the mission.
Regardless, outsourcing has been a proven solution to medical staffing problems as it saves health systems a lot of cash in the short and long term.
How Common Is Medical Staff Outsourcing?
Medical staff outsourcing is not as uncommon as you might believe. For non-core functions, health systems and even hospitals regularly outsource to specialized service companies. This leads to increased service, better quality, and - perhaps most importantly - helps control the costs for doing so.
More recently, outsourcing has been proven to increase revenue, lower patient costs, improve the quality of service, help ensure compliance, and even greater physician satisfaction. An outsourced medical staff could also help a practice or hospital to employ more physicians.
When Is Medical Staff Outsourcing The Best Option?
In general, outsourcing is the best option for practices that understand the value of their medical staff but lack sufficient resources to support or create one in-house. Through medical staff outsourcing, these practices benefit from entrusting vital responsibilities to an external entity that specializes in medical staffing to deliver this value to their patients.
Outsourcing allows you to dedicate the resources and staff required to maintain optimized levels of performance in your medical team. Here are some common problems that outsourcing your medical staff to a responsible third party has solved for health systems.
- Not having consistent practices between the current internal medical staff departments at multiple locations within the same healthcare system. (This leads to increased costs, not to mention dissatisfaction with practitioners.)
- Failing to maximize third-party payer revenue due to poor credentialing and privileging. (This can be further complicated by not handling regulatory and accreditation requirements properly, which is a compliance risk.)
- A disconnect between stakeholders (leads to delays and difficulty getting them all onboard).
How Do You Save Cash By Outsourcing Staff?
In the long term, outsourced medical staffing leads to improve the overall internal compliance situation as well as achieve the proper accreditation and regulatory requirements. This will show itself in lower costs of service and better reimbursements from third-payer payers. In the short term, reducing internal staff overhead will yield the following optimal business outcomes:
- Save on paying medical benefits
- Avoid paying employee taxes
- Save time & money on interviewing new applicants
Of course, there will still be costs to fund your outsourced medical staff, but they will not include any of those outward cash flows required of an internal team. Meanwhile, your practice or hospital will have a more specialized team involved in the complicated regulatory and compliance matters that drain the cash flow of many healthcare systems. I guess the question to ask at the end of the day is will outsourcing your medical staff help your practice grow and improve?
