San Francisco, CA / Manila, Philippines (PRWEB) December 02, 2014
MicroSourcing International, Inc., an industry leader in providing Managed Operations for Business/Knowledge Process Outsourcing (BPO/KPO) services in the Philippines, is seeing increased interest from U.S. Healthcare companies about building medical coding operations to help fill their need for medical coding resources. The upcoming implementation of ICD-10 medical coding regulations is a major disruption to the U.S. healthcare industry and is expected to create an even larger shortage of qualified medical coding professionals in the United States.
The U.S. Healthcare industry has been working with the current version of ICD-9 since 1979 and the new ICD-10 regulations will become effective on October 1, 2015. The transition to ICD-10 is significant and will radically change the way coding is done, with the number of codes under ICD-10 increasing dramatically from approximately 18,000 to 140,000 codes.
At the recent American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conference there were discussions about the impact of the loss of productivity as Medical Coders struggle with getting proficient with the new codes. There is also an expectation that many Medical Coders will decide to retire and not to get trained in ICD-10.
United Healthcare, WellPoint and Aetna, which represent three of the largest U.S. healthcare companies all have operations in the Philippines and they have helped drive last year’s 55% growth in healthcare services outsourced to the Philippines. Industry experts are forecasting the number of Philippine workers in the healthcare outsourcing segment to reach 120,000 by 2016.
MicroSourcing is being told by many of the U.S. healthcare companies inquiring about setting up a medical coding operation, that they feel they need to explore all the available options to ensure they can meet their production requirements. Cary Weltken, MicroSourcing’s SVP-North America said “our Managed Operations delivery model is the perfect solution for healthcare companies who need certified medical coders to meet production requirements, but need to maintain total operational control and meet strict data security requirements for HIPAA compliance”.
Philip Koojiman, CEO of MicroSourcing adds “it is estimated that the Philippines has a pool of over 150,000 nursing school graduates that we can draw on to become AAPC CPC medical coders. Our current U.S. healthcare customers who have coding operations with MicroSourcing have all indicated that they plan to grow their Philippine operations as a way to meet their increasing productivity requirements”.
About MicroSourcing:
MicroSourcing enables companies from around the world to have their own operations in the Philippines through its Managed Operations services model. The company offers a powerful hybrid outsourcing solution whereby MicroSourcing provides all the assets, resources and operations support functions in the Philippines. Clients retain operational control and can fully customize how operations are established and managed on a daily basis. MicroSourcing currently has more than 2,500 employees working in the Philippines operations of more than 142 companies from all over the world. Visit their Healthcare Solutions website at http://www.microsourcing.com/medical-coding/ or their main website at http://www.microsourcing.com/
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