Apollo Health Street bags two medical BPO orders
By siliconindia staff writer   |   Wednesday, 08 October 2003, 19:30 IST
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KOLKATA: Apollo Health Street (AHSL), an arm of Apollo Hospitals Group, has bagged two new contracts in the medical BPO segment from the US. With this development, the management expects 25% growth in the BPO-led turnover in this fiscal. While both the contracts have come from New York, one is on the billing procedure and the second on the coding procedure. However, the company sources did not disclose the name of the two giant players whose work it will outsource. The billing contract has been of a large physician practice in a multi-disciplinary hospital. In US, the physician bills the insurance agency separately and the hospital bills independently. “We are also implementing the technology for the whole procedure,” said Vikram Chhatwal, CEO, AHSL. The coding contract is of another player where a set of codes are recorded for the medical diagnostics before the bill is generated. “This involves a lot of accuracy since if the records are undercoded, the doctor gets less money and overcoded leads to the violation of Federal laws,” Mr Chhatwal added. Most of the revenue losses in the US hospitals are due to undercoding. While the accuracy in US is about 60% in coding, India has been able to achieve an accuracy of about 98% in medical coding, Mr Chhatwal told ET. This is a main reason why India may see more of medical coding jobs flying across the continents. While Apollo coders are already certified by the American Association of Procedural Coding (AAPC), most of the other players are now actively vying for this accreditation. With these contracts, AHSL currently has three coding contracts and two billing contracts. Now AHSL in the ‘payer and provider’ segment of medical BPO is looking for bagging contracts from the payer or US medical insurance companies. “We are not only in talks with eight hospitals in US but also with one of the largest medical insurance company in north America,” Mr Chhatwal told ET. AHSL had a turnover of Rs 8 crore in the last fiscal of which nearly 65% is from the medical BPO segment.

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