By Kevin Connolly

Healthcare insiders know that the industry is undergoing unprecedented change and companies and providers alike must adjust to new challenges and opportunities. Although outsourcing of various services was always a standard industry practice, there has been a recent, noticeable shift in the type and the number of services companies are delegating to third-party vendors. Some of the key drivers of outsourcing include staff and cost pressures, the desire to enhance focus on core business processes and the ability to rapidly deploy critical new programs. By partnering with trained, compliant and specialized third parties, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies can increase efficiency and effectiveness and better balance cost and value.

Key Outsourcing Trends 

According to outsourcing experts, below are a few of the biggest outsourcing trends in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries:

Pharmacovigilance – As more companies recognize the importance of effective drug safety in ensuring patient safety, product integrity and company reputation, they also recognize the immense cost savings and efficiency that can be achieved by outsourcing pharmacovigilance services to an expert provider. The Transparency Market Research report found the global pharmacovigilance market to reach a market worth of $5 billion in 2019, and with good reason as these third-party partners have the ability to balance high quality adverse event processing and reporting with unpredictable volumes, all while meeting new needs in signaling, surveillance and risk management. 

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By Dean Wiech

In any industry passwords can be a hassle to manage, but perhaps this is no more true than healthcare. Password strategies are put in place to keep data secure, including patient’s information, but they often cause headaches for clinicians. And since every minute matters in the clinical setting, any process that takes longer than necessary can become a major problem when patient outcomes hang in the balance.

Since providers often need to access their own systems, as well as patient data and treatment history quickly, to assist patients, something as simple as getting locked out of systems or forgetting credentials to accounts is time consumer and tedious to overcome. Contacting the helpdesk and waiting to get passwords reset wastes what little time caregivers have to with patients. Simplifying password resets can give critical time back to caregivers and support staff in the care setting.

Easier said than done, of course. Many healthcare organizations resist implementing any type of password solution because they don’t want to bombard clinicians with yet another new technology. One of the major reasons being that they assume the implementation and training time are lengthy and because they’re currently bogged down by a variety of other pressing issues, such as meaningful use and preparing for the transition to ICD-10 in October 2015.
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Few industries in the United States enjoy the prosperity, steady stream of customers and guaranteed revenue increases of the health care industry. According to the World Bank, the U.S. spends nearly 18 percent of our gross domestic product, nearly $3 trillion, on health care services. As hospitals and health providers expand services and customer bases, administrators look to improve efficiency in order to minimize a bottleneck as more and more seniors require health care. With the trend towards outsourcing, how will the health care options for seniors look in the near future?

Patient Care

While many health providers want to match up a patient with a doctor over the long term of their care, health services that do not require a physician’s attention have steadily been moving away from a central facility. John Boland, director of Navigant Consulting, told Becker’s Hospital Review that the five most outsourced treatments consist of non-physician care, including anesthesia, dialysis and diagnostics. This outsourcing trend affects hospitals more than primary patient care facilities, but it may require seniors in assisted living communities to visit secondary facilities to get non-physician treatment.
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By Kashif Aftab

The US market for healthcare IT is expected to grow 24 percent annually from 2012 to 2014, according to a study from RNCOS, a global market research and information analysis company. As hospitals struggle to implement e-health systems and keep up with HITECH reform, selecting the proper vendor is crucial not only to the financial stability of the hospital, but also to avoid future penalties and loss of reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Many vendors selecting IT services do not hold the bench strength required to complete large and complex healthcare IT projects. As a result, these vendors race to sub-contract projects and prices can skyrocket for the client. This is a concept called ‘stacking. Vendors focus so much on signing the deal that identifying the resources need for fulfillment becomes a last-minute effort. The result is layered sub-vendors, which can drive prices up and bring down the quality of the project team.

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