Having multiple vendors is a trend that has been picked up in most industries. The medical billing and coding services industry has been a cautious observer so far but is slowly warming up to this idea too.
Outsourcing and offshoring are not new ideas to healthcare service providers. In fact, most RCM service providers started outsourcing some or most of their processes from the 1990s. While outsourcing and offshoring were common, using multiple vendors was not, during that period. It was only after 2003 that service providers started cautiously approaching the idea of hiring more than one vendor to handle their billing and coding processes.
According to experts in the industry, the advantages of hiring two vendors for your RCM needs may outweigh the challenges of maintaining different vendor management systems and other initial hiccups.
So as a service provider, what are your advantages of having two vendors handle processes? This article will help you decide whether or not this change is for you.
How risky is it to ‘put all your eggs in one basket’? Logically, offering all your business to a single service provider is always a risk that you have to be wary of. Here are potential problems at the vendor’s end that can threaten to stall your everyday activities.
Network outages are common, especially in remote countries your vendor may be operating out of. Imagine what a 24-hour network outage can do to your business? Having two vendors in different locations minimizes the risk, and even if one location halts processes, the other one will back you up.
This is one reason why some medical billing and coding service companies operate out of multiple locations themselves. Quintessence understands the part we play in ensuring the smooth functioning of our client business. This is precisely why we run out of two locations in India – Chennai and Coimbatore.
Apart from outages, internal labor problems, political situations, and risks of data hacking are all risks that can be mitigated by hiring two vendors.
Let’s say you have been working with a single vendor for a long time now and have a pre-decided SLA and pricing terms. How would you know that you aren’t overpaying for the service offered? An easy way to know is to invite a competitor to offer a new quote. If you think there is a discrepancy in the pricing, this gives you a solid platform to renegotiate with your vendor.
Some brands choose to work with two vendors – one quoting a price higher than their budget and the other quoting lower than their budget to find a balance. As a medical billing and coding services company, every penny of yours matters, and you can bring down your operational costs by having a two-vendor strategy.
Let’s say there is a vendor who has consistently shown exceptional reimbursement rates and Net Collection Rates (NCR). There is another vendor who is the industry leader when it comes to using technology. How would you logically get the best of these two worlds?
By hiring the services of both these service providers, of course.
Many of our clients prefer partnering with Quintessence for our technological strength. Our Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence tools are some of the best in the industry, offering unparalleled competitive edge and process efficiency. Our bots learn every single day, improving the quality of service provided and upgrading your processes over time.
It also does help that we consistently manage to meet our performance guarantees, employ some of the best medical billing and coding brains in the country and offer a strategic contingency-fee model that our clients largely appreciate.
So, a two-vendor strategy may just be the kind of competitive advantage that you have been looking for, as long as you pick the right vendors!
If you are interested in checking out Quintessence’s technological expertise, click here to know more!
Now, as a team that strongly believes in holistic growth and development, not just as a brand but as an industry, this is an advantage that is very close to our hearts.
Offshore or otherwise, multiple RCM service providers have just started up, with a keen zeal to grow and offer best-in-class services. Their prices are extremely competitive and their teams enthusiastic. As a service provider, you can help such vendors up their game by choosing two vendors – one a small or a growing brand and the other with the right experience, skills, and industry knowledge.
The smaller vendor usually starts reverse-engineering, identifying where they need to change/get better. They now have a medical billing and coding services competitor in close quarters to analyze and learn from. As a result, you will see the vendor getting better with the processes and figures, growing as a result of the two-vendor strategy you adopted. This way, the smaller vendor grows, and your values get better too.
Also, once a vendor locks in on a client, it loses the urge to constantly improve services and concentrate only on meeting the pre-set SLAs. As a result, the scope of betterment and improved quality is lowered.
By having to compete with another brand, these vendors have the constant pressure of proving themselves, and this becomes advantageous to the client! The vendors usually grow more responsive to the needs of the client, offer out-of-box solutions to impress them, and keep updating their solutions and services!
There was a time when people were hesitant about outsourcing processes, fearing losing quality and control. Right now, though, outsourcing is a multi-billion-dollar industry by itself.
It is alright if you approach the dual vendor strategy a little cautiously. However, all that we say is that don’t ignore it altogether. This is a trend that is here to stay, and by choosing the right medical billing and coding services partner, you may get the much-needed boost to grow aggressively and capture the industry.
Quintessence has worked both as a single primary vendor and as a part of a dual-vendor system for clients from the beginning, and we have learned, grown, and adapted successfully in both such environments. In competition or not, Quintessence has sure leaped up in providing world-class solutions to our clients which makes us their favorite go-to partner for their medical billing and coding services. If you are looking for a second vendor or your first primary vendor, click here.
