BancTec, a global leader in business process outsourcing (BPO) and financial transaction automation, today announced that one of its vice presidents, Michael Alfonsi, will speak during May at two conferences, discussing disruptive trends in operational treasury and the future of outsourcing.

Alfonsi, who is managing director of financial transaction processing services and finance transformation solutions at BancTec, will first speak May 10 at the Windy City Summit, a Chicago-based conference that focuses on delivering the most innovative solutions and efficiencies for treasury, cash management, finance, and banking industry professionals. There he’ll present “Ten Disruptive Trends in Operational Treasury,” which explores possible roadblocks and their impact on finance, their associated risks, and the potential rewards. From cloud computing to digital paper, these trends will affect not only treasury and finance, but accounts receivable, revenue management, accounts payable, and strategic sourcing.

On May 21, Alfonsi will head to Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando for Fusion 2013, the Institute of Financial Operations’ premier event, with more than 1,500 financial operations professionals attending five days of educational sessions, keynotes and networking opportunities. Fusion covers the full spectrum of financial operations and features peer-driven learning with some of the industry’s best minds. In Orlando, Alfonsi will present “Outsourcing: Is it Dead, Alive, or In-between?” Business process outsourcing has become a $600 billion industry, and Alfonsi’s session will explore industry trends and help attendees determine if outsourcing is right for their companies.

“I think the one thing the two sessions have in common is they’re both trying to look around the curve,” Alfonsi said.

As vice president and managing director for BancTec’s financial transaction services, Alfonsi is responsible for the company’s suite of payments transaction solutions. More importantly, Alfonsi is part of a leadership team whose primary responsibility is to help clients succeed by leveraging a thorough understanding of their needs and business performance expectations. Known for his enthusiastic and content-rich speaking appearances at international, national and regional forums, Alfonsi is as an energetic executive who applies his leadership expertise to drive change and produce dynamic gains in revenue, profit and performance.

With the physical architecture of computing and processes continuing to decline, cloud computing has become the hot commodity in nearly every corner of the business process outsourcing world. But is cloud computing right for your company?

When cloud computing first became popular, analysts thought it might supercede IT outsourcing and BPO, diminishing the field’s relevance. General thinking held that if customers could rent IT capabilities over the Internet — which is what cloud computing is, essentially — why would they need to outsource their records management or payment processing? Over the past five years, though, it’s become clear that these two fields will likely grow together. Companies have learned to combine the two processes, rather than have them work in competition.

“Cloud technology is a big buzzword today,” BancTec chief technology officer Mark Fairchild said in an interview. “It’s a bit like people running around saying they’ve seen Elvis again. It’s all over the place.”

The major advantage of cloud computing is time, according to Pervez Delawalla, CEO of Net2EZ, a data center company. Startup businesses you can get up and running reasonably quickly and with minimal investment because they no longer have to buy servers, he told Smart Business.

“Outsourcing to cloud computing can lower your costs and allow your company to focus on its strengths, knowing the rest is being taken care of up in the cloud,” he said.

Other industry experts recommend a stepped, nuanced approach. If your company hasn’t considered using cloud technology before, consider a “cloud candidate” project, said Pete Sclafani, CIO at 6Connect, a network automation company. Find an application that would work well both on-site or off-site, so you have a baseline for its efficiency in both settings.

“Companies that choose this route — or any cloud strategy — must take a pragmatic approach,” Sclafani told TechTarget. “The first step is simply knowing what applications you are supporting and what their environmental requirements are. Something as basic as an application audit can help ensure that you have your ducks in a row.”

There are downsides as well, especially from an operational treasury standpoint. Cloud computing represents a fundamental shift in how organizations will view the management of their data, and also affect their ability to perform shifts from internal execution to provider selection. As cloud computing further replaces the view of the traditional data center, it’s important for companies to understand the concept, and how it can make your work more efficient.

The global BPO market is expected to grow more than 5 percent in 2013, buoyed in part by increased finance and accounting outsourcing worldwide and the growth of BPO in new corners of the world.

Finance and accounting BPO could climb 8 percent, HFS Research and KPMG concluded in a recent study, after posting a 13-percent increase in deals in 2012. Prior years showed a steady decline of F&A BPO services; the turnaround is a clear sign of the global market’s bounce-back following a string of economic crises. Total finance and accounting BPO is expected to surpass $25 billion this year.

“Motivations to adopt F&A have reverted back to cost and standardization of process,” the report reads. “While enterprises value innovation and analytical value, they want to get the basics right first. With 90% of BPO engagements meeting cost reduction and efficiency goals, there is a host of enterprises now looking to augment of start their F&A BPO initiatives.”

Finance and accounting, of course, is just one piece of the BPO puzzle. Growth can also be attributed to newer players in the BPO industry, such as Malaysia, Tunisia and the Philippines. In the Philippines, healthcare BPO has increased nearly four-fold since just 2010, climbing from a $102 million industry then to a $430 million one today. That number is expected to climb to $1 billion by 2016, the Everest Group reported.

In Malaysia, the country’s BPO trade group, National Information and Communications Technology Association of Malaysia, is advocating for a top-level government ministry position dedicated solely to the promotion of the country’s BPO companies. And Tunisia — which experienced its first wave of IT-BPO work in the early 2000s — offers a well-educated workforce that is finally settling down following the country’s move to democracy in 2011.

So when searching for the optimal claims, payment or document, or payment processing center, companies will have more geographic options. The larger issue, as always, remains the quality of the service.

Third in a series

In healthcare, automating every step of the pre-adjudication cycle – meaning anything that happens before the payment of a claim – allows claims to be processed more efficiently and more accurately. As claims processing improves, auto-adjudication rates rise and the total cost per claim falls.

Healthcare payers and benefit administrators are provided with pre-adjudication technologies that replace error-prone human processes and provides applications for PPO network management, document management, workflow and overpayment protection. These solutions improve adjudication rates, increase payment accuracy and enhance customer service. Simply put, business process outsourcing can provide better, faster and more cost-effective processing than any manual, in-house paper-based method.

Modern providers are notably different from traditional outsourced labor and BPO solutions, because the claim-cleaning power is derived completely from automation. The powerful technology can:

• Eliminate error-prone human processes
• Guarantee increased pre-adjudication rates
• Increase claim payment accuracy
• Lower costs per claim.

A cleaner payment process is created by innovative automation technology that eliminates dirty data on the front end. The lower an organization’s adjudication rate, the more advanced pre-adjudication technologies can help.

Outsourcing Technology Delivers

Automation solutions can provide health plans with the best options for paper conversion, EDI claim cleaning and disaster recovery. Many find that high-quality technology simply delivers the best value at the lowest cost for accurate claims processing. Additionally, when a health plan or benefit administrator uses a BPO provider to manage its core pre-adjudication process, related services like mailroom and clearinghouse integration can become significantly less expensive to conduct since the core claim data is cleaned and indexed.

Outsourcing technology can create faster cycle times and meets specialized demands of leading healthcare organizations, achieving a balance between solving industry challenges and compliance restrictions while improving the bottom line and the customer experience. However, to align with your specific business needs, the technology must be scalable to quickly ingest new groups and business lines into the claims process. A true customized and scalable solution can provide 99.9 percent system availability.

Second in a series

The review, investigation and processing of claims can be time-consuming and prone to human error. By initiating an advanced healthcare claims processing system, you can alleviate many of these issues and ensure the accuracy of all claims processed.

Paper and electronic data interchange (EDI) claims can be imaged and converted to electronic format and transmitted back to integrate with the appropriate claim system. With a special focus on the front-end operations for claims processing, 100 percent electronic claims submission can be enabled to reduce administrative costs and improve auto-adjudication rates.

The most trusted BPO providers have made significant investments in enterprise software and infrastructure development, specifically addressing data security requirements. Annual external audits can ensure compliance; and multisite processing models can allow for superior business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.

The introduction of advanced claim validation (ACV) accomplishes something that takes many BPO companies years to master. ACV is claim review based on deep industry knowledge and actual historical claims experience with individual providers, geographies, specialties and settings of care. ACV balances heuristic data – such as ZIP codes, gender, and correlated data – so that payers are not inaccurately matching the claim data themselves. It takes out the manual intervention, allowing the correct payment to be sent to the provider without the payer having to touch the claim at all.

This technology enhances the data for each payer and is customized for its payment system. The data flows into the appropriate claims system and is reflected as requested. ACV generates specific instructions for the exception processing technology to direct the claim specialists to problem areas for correction.

Achieving Better Than Humanly Possible Claim Quality

Well-designed business rules can evaluate each new claim against history for a provider or geographic region across diagnosis, procedure, setting of care, price and other measures.

When industry and customer-specific business rules are strengthened with statistical filing patterns sampled from millions of actual claims, the results are impressive. The intelligence enables the BPO vendor to “know” providers to create customized instructions for each claim and to quickly highlight issues for correction.

First in a series

For years, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) claims submission has reduced payer rejections and administrative costs while increasing the speed of the payment. So why do EDI transactions still have adjudication issues? The reason is that the best data the provider has is simply not good enough.

Payers and providers have natural differences in update cycles, systems and business processes that contribute to adjudication errors. Payers contract with providers at longer periods than members – and members often update their information only annually.

More often than not, data is never given to the provider until an encounter, so demographic data becomes stale very quickly. This means providers have little opportunity to get patient data corrected. Plus, they have limited resources and capabilities to keep their own demographic data synchronized with every payer.

Because of these challenges, it is ideal to partner with a BPO provider that maintains close professional relationships with major PPO networks and clearinghouses to allow direct integration when processing EDI claims. The automation technology can reconcile the difference between provider and payer data, including provider and member information. Once received, the data submitted on EDI claims is cleaned and enhanced through matching and data augmentation to synchronize the data on the claim with the data the payer expects to see. This significantly improves auto-adjudication rates.

Increase Your Claims Quality with BPO

The health insurance industry uses a claims processing metric called claim-level quality, but traditional OCR providers scan a claim and provide a claim-level representation of what was originally presented on the claim. Today, BPO providers can recognize that data errors – even those that match the claim submission – represent more expensive reject-processing consequences. A real quality guarantee includes a match rate of providers and members to a file with a less than 1 percent reject rate.

In addition to data reconciliation, processing both EDI and paper claims maximizes the ability to find the greatest number of duplicate claims that providers sometimes file by printing an EDI claim to paper in an attempt to accelerate payment. With the vast majority of data problems in healthcare introduced by synchronization issues, the percentage of improved EDI claims received can increase by as much as 90 percent when an outsourcing solution is implemented correctly.

Customers expect their BPO service providers to be exceptional in what they do, but what do BPO providers look for in their customers? Outsourcing vendors seek partnership and collaboration to achieve optimal business processes.

“A collaboration between provider and client must be a partnership in the truest sense of the word,” said BancTec’s Maria Allen in a recent article on Outsourcing-Center.com. “The industry has matured and the work has moved up the value chain, away from a model primarily focused on reducing the cost of labor and toward a model of collaboration and shared efficiencies and innovation. This is creating new challenges for providers and clients alike.”

As senior vice president and president of the Americas at BancTec, Allen shares that BPO has become more than simply a cost savings initiative. Customers demand solutions, and the outsourcing provider must understand the client’s business to transform the chosen work process and manage ongoing improvement efforts.

BPO providers who have a defined planning and execution method can continuously increase the value for clients as a true strategic business partner. In this way, the client’s short-term and long-term goals can be achieved through outsourcing.

By acting as a consultant figure, the BPO vendor can help evaluate and envision which financial and back-office processes will benefit most from outsourcing. Once decided, the chosen business process can be redesigned to improve the client’s unique processing needs based on industry best practices. Process optimization should continue to occur as long as the BPO partnership is in place.

With a shared vision, BPO providers and customers can achieve a smarter way to outsource together.

For more information on how BPO partnerships thrive on collaboration, read “The Value of BPO: The Proof is in the Partnership” on Outsourcing-Center.com.

Healthcare claims processing can involve expensive and serious consequences if the data is not processed correctly. To address these issues, healthcare payers and benefit administrators are turning to digital pre-adjudication technologies to replace error-prone human processes and increase claim payment accuracy. This involves electronically organizing the data before the payment of a claim is made.

Using technology instead of manual processes allows the solution to be customized to adapt to specific business requirements and improve performance without additional capital investment. Advanced BPO providers can automate the claims process, including claim data cleaning to increase claims quality and reduce overall costs.

With the right technology, healthcare claims can be improved so that they match system files; thus, lowering reject rates and improving adjudication rates all while ensuring HIPAA security and consistency.

Automation Technology Can Advance the Claims Process

The latest automation technology can increase data accuracy, lower costs and bring faster cycle times to the healthcare claims process. The technology can automate and integrate all aspects of pre-adjudication claims processing, including cleaning and enhancing claim data.

These automation services can perform three major functions:

1. Extraction

• Data receipt and extraction
• Image pre-processing
• Forms classification

2. Enhancement

• Advanced claim validation (ACV) using claim heuristic databases
• Provider and member matching methodologies
• Exception data validation

3. Integration

• Customized claim system integration
• Secure HIPAA-compliant EDI transmissions
• File transfer acknowledgements

Automated provider-member file matching works with files to align claim data with provider and member data for improved accuracy. With a sophisticated searching methodology, business rules can enhance provider and member file matching. Business rules and industry edits can further cleanse claim data to deliver quality results closely aligned with the adjudication system.

The latest advanced provider-member verification systems guarantee 99-percent accuracy when matching claim data to member and provider files. Plus, customized processing rules can emulate decisions made by examiners to automatically integrate and align the data.

Sophisticated business rules include industry edits and pattern recognition technologies, and these rules can combine to ensure data quality, lower costs and improve auto-adjudication rates

BancTec representatives this week presented a smarter way to outsource healthcare back-office processes at the HIMSS13 Annual Conference & Exhibition in New Orleans.

Using its Intelligent BPO (iBPO) methodology, BancTec delivers advanced healthcare BPO solutions designed specifically to improve process efficiency and reduce costs.

Intelligent healthcare solutions improve provider/patient relationships by helping improve collections, eliminate write-offs, increase yields, and enhance in-process claim visibility. For healthcare providers, BancTec offers medical lockbox services, EOB processing and medical records management. Additional services include claims processing, AP automation and inbound mail services.

“At BancTec, we listen to the concerns of healthcare providers and payers so we can deliver a smarter, customized outsourcing solution,” said Chuck Corbin, vice president for strategy and business development at BancTec.

BancTec discussed a number of healthcare concerns at HIMSS13. In the video below, Corbin examines one pain point for healthcare providers and how medical lockbox services can help.

Protecting patient records, locating information faster, and reducing administrative overheard are just a few challenges faced by healthcare providers today. Whether you are a hospital, clinic or small practice, you should evaluate your Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) strategies.

Because manual medical records processing is cumbersome and time-consuming, today’s healthcare companies utilize various outsourcing solutions. Proactive organizations are using business process outsourcing in their medical records operations to simplify processes and improve efficiencies.

One concern many companies have about outsourcing solutions is security. Outsourced solutions can have robust security features that safeguard your documents and their integrity. But your potential BPO vendor must understand healthcare and the need to comply with regulations.

Outsourcing solutions can help healthcare organizations accelerate billing and collections, simplify HIPAA compliance and improve accountability. The costs of meeting HIPAA regulations can be reduced with digital records storage and comprehensive security measures.

Reap the Benefits of Electronic Medical Records

The federal government has mandated a shift towards electronic medical records, and BPO providers can help physicians and hospitals adopt a better system, avoid penalties, and receive implementation payment incentives.

Converting your paper-based medical records into electronic files allows for full EHR implementation. Backfile conversion services can convert your existing paper files to images and store them on your preferred media. These digital records can be scanned, indexed and integrated into your existing imaging system or stored in a secure repository.

High-volume scanning and conversion services – both onsite and offsite – save time and money. High-speed scanning services automate the process and reduce the need for equipment investment. Using the latest technology ensures your conversion project will be done correctly and delivered on time and on budget.

BPO Enhances Availability, Security, Longevity

Quality BPO solutions guarantee high-speed, accurate scanning. The technology can index, store and send critical documents to and from your business. Your BPO vendor can provide you with the flexibility to accommodate your day-to-day routine workflow and manage the most complex conversion projects.

So reap the benefits of document imaging without the costs related to expensive in-house solutions. BPO solutions can ensure the availability, security and longevity of your medical records.