Outsourcing your Medical Billing offshore: Is it worth the Risk?

Medical billing is one of the most critical operations in a medical practice. It’s also the most expensive and time-consuming. That’s why U.S. practices are increasingly relying on offshore companies for their medical billing. The benefits of offshore outsourcing are clear:

• It frees up valuable time for you to focus on practice growth or work-life balance.
• It makes your billing operations more cost- and time-efficient.
• It’s often much cheaper than using a domestic company.

But what about the drawbacks of using an offshore medical billing company? Unfortunately, there are several, and they’re far from minor.

Data protection

All of your vendors will have some degree of access to sensitive data, but few will have the level and breadth of access that your chosen medical billing company does. They’ll know the ins and outs of your finances, insurance data, patient records, and more, making any potential data breach that much more catastrophic.

Local regulations

Countries like China and India are popular, cost-efficient choices for medical billing outsourcing. However, in some overseas countries, regulations around data security can be poorly defined and weakly enforced. Despite your best efforts to protect your data on the U.S. side, you have very little control over it once it crosses over into other jurisdictions, so you’re essentially at the mercy of their regulatory whims.

Financial loss

The sensitivity and enormity of your medical billing data is such that if it were to fall into the wrong hands, the financial damage would be devastating. HIPAA violation penalties alone can sink a medical practice, not to mention other regulatory fines and even loss of business due to reputational damage.

Managing your risk offshore

If you do decide to take your medical billing offshore, there are steps you can take to mitigate your risk.

Conduct a risk assessment

Before you consider outsourcing, it’s wise to take stock of your practice vulnerabilities. What damage might a person with a sufficiently high level of access be able to do if they were so inclined?

Best conducted by a third party, a risk assessment will identify all of the potential weak spots that a bad actor could exploit. This might include data on your finances, your patients, your staff, or even your other vendors. It could also include the credentials that your staff or vendors use to access other sensitive information.

Not every breach is malicious, but an accidental security failure can be just as damaging as a deliberate one. A thorough risk assessment will highlight these vulnerabilities too.

Do your due diligence

Before doing business with an offshore vendor, be sure to thoroughly vet both their people and their systems.

From the owner to the admin team, request a full list of personnel who will have access to your data. Speak to the hiring team to understand the screening and vetting procedures these employees have undergone, and ensure that you’re satisfied with the thoroughness of their processes.

From a systems perspective, find out what procedures and policies they have in place to protect your data as it moves through their organization. Request specific information about:

• Risk management – how do they assess risk and what do they do to prevent breaches?
• Data management – what steps do they take to ensure safe storage and transmission?
• Security monitoring – how vigilant are they and how quickly could they react to a breach?
• Software – who are their software vendors and is the software vulnerable to attack?
• Credentialing — are employees sufficiently trained to protect access credentials like passwords?

Understand the regulatory landscape

Research the data protection laws and regulations in the home country of your chosen billing provider. Do they offer equal or better protection than you could expect in the U.S.? More importantly, are these laws and regulations strictly and consistently enforced, or is it easy to bend the rules? Even the most stringent laws are useless if nobody is enforcing them!

Anonymize

Even if you’re satisfied that your chosen provider is up to the challenge of protecting your data, anonymization of identifiable information can provide an extra layer of security. By disguising financial and personal details at your end, you can render the information useless for re-sale or malicious use.

Of course, this will require a little more time and expense on your part, which may negate the purpose of outsourcing in the first place. However, when compared to the potential cost of a data breach, this extra step seems well worth the effort.

Want to save time and money without the risk?

Of course, there are plenty of reputable offshore medical billing organizations all over the world, and many U.S. practices save time and money with them every year. However, there are enough horror stories out there to give any sensible practice owner or manager pause for thought, and you could be taking a major gamble hoping not to be one of them! Could your practice survive if you lost that bet?

If you’d rather not find out, consider outsourcing your medical billing to a domestic company like Ideal Practice Solutions. Thanks to our 50 years of experience in medical billing, practices all over the U.S. trust us to take care of their most sensitive financial data. You can optimize your medical billing processes and reclaim your valuable time, confident that your data is protected by industry-leading security protocols right here in the U.S.

Want to know more about how our medical billing services can help your practice? Schedule a consultation and get a free practice analysis now (worth $2500.00)