Health outsourcing: Three IIT graduates show the way

Pune, April 28 As per a report of the American Healthcare Association, the profitability of US hospitals dropped from 6.1per cent in 1996 to 2.8 per cent in 2004. Today, around 40 per cent of the US hospitals make losses. The only way hospitals and doctors could offer high quality services were by cutting costs and the most effective and easiest way to cut cost was outsourcing administrative work.

And here’s how a group of IIT graduates who had set up a shop in the city to provide medical billing services for US hospitalist physicians-have come a long way in addressing to end product requirements. Three IITians Gautam Naik, Rajeev Singh and Zahra Nazneen came together two years ago and have promoted the Net Android company in Pune which has Head quarters in USA.

According to Gautam Naik, CEO of Net Android, companies like this did not waste time in grabbing the opportunity of medical billing outsourcing and then started the second phase of US healthcare outsourcing.

Net Android’s Hospitalist IQ solution-is a global business and IT solutions provider with a support centre in Pune offering medical billing solutions and services. The firm currently has a client base of six major hospitalist practice groups in the US and is looking to strengthen the Pune centre. Net Android handles monthly billing collections to the tune of around 6 million US dollars.

Hospitalists are doctors practicing in hospitals and Hospitalist IQ is customisable, easy to use and ideal for single or multiple physician groups and locations. Hospitalist IQ software processes are integrated within billing application and it allows the user to capture the encounters more accurately and reduce lost charges as integrated platform will eliminate duplicate data entry, errors and associated cost.

The main challenge for Healthcare BPO companies like Net Android is, falling rates in margin owing to increased competition in India and other countries like China, Vietnam and Thailand. ``The solution lies in moving up in healthcare outsourcing chain; provide end to end solutions across all tiers and thinking beyond the regular medical billing or claims adjudication kind of transactions processing work” says Naik who now aims at a geographical spread of their services in USA. We also aim to provide various data services not only to hospitalists but also to other stake holders in the health care practices, he said.