What is quality?
To sustain growth in the competitive environment, organizations need to create and retain satisfied clients. To achieve this goal, organizations have to provide services, value for money, meet the client’s requirements and service level agreements as well as deliver on time. In short, each and every organization needs to provide quality services. ‘Productivity without quality does not yield anything’.
Many organizations develop their own management philosophies, beliefs and visions to help satisfy their clients. Choosing the best way for them, they can either go through a process of trial and error, select from the vast body of knowledge management, or utilize one or more management models available that combine proven principles and concepts.
Ensuring Quality
As established outsourcing entities are besieged by new entrants specializing in Revenue cycle management from other low-cost countries, new sources of service differentiation become crucial to maintain the loyalty of existing clients and attract new ones. The cost factor alone has been a risky strategy. In Medical Billing & Coding, clients are no longer looking for the lowest cost but rather a combination of cost, quality, and long-term relationship resulting in optimized revenue for their physician billling.
This shift has urged outsourcing entities to adopt an uncompromising approach towards quality to earn customer loyalty by providing services that are of the highest quality and greatest value.
Quality, particularly in a highly competitive environment under healthcare billing is more about cost-effectiveness, carefully reviewing failure modes at every stage and more importantly, planning to prevent such failures. Performance levels of most processes have the tendency to decrease over time unless forces are exerted to maintain them. This means that, simply maintaining quality at its current state will require some efforts, but in the long run, this will not be enough to beat the competition. To create continual improvement, one should look beyond compliance and have quality built into the organization.
Quality is a journey without a finish line. Quality should be viewed as a partnership between the customer and the supplier to continually improve the businesses processes and sharing the benefits for a real ‘win-win’ relationship.
A systematic approach towards quality to meet the competitive challenges should emphasize on benchmarking, quality measurement, quality-oriented training, employee focus on zero defects, process improvement and top management commitment & involvement for customer satisfaction.