By Elisa Mary Jane F. Dimaano
A P20-MILLION business-process outsourcing (BPO) project has been approved by the Board of Investments (BOI), involved in the fastest-growing sub-sector in the BPO industry: health information management (HIM).
Milenia Data Systems Inc.’s BPO operations was given the green light by the investment-promotion agency. It is expected to provide outsourcing services, specifically medical coding, to individual health-care facilities and rehabilitation centers in the US.
With 23 employees when operations started in March 2017, Milenia is projected to employ up to 88 personnel by 2022.
Trade Undersecretary and BOI Managing Head Ceferino Rodolfo said in a statement: “The Philippines is in a position to take advantage of this outsourcing boom in the health-information management sector. The sector can easily tap the estimated 125,000 annual graduates of allied-medical courses, including at least 80,000 in the nursing, physical therapist, medical technologist and physician professions.”
HIM is the practice of obtaining, storing and evaluating patients’ medical data in hospitals or other health-care organizations, enabling the delivery of quality health care to the public.
The Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines foresees the contact-center sector will still fuel the majority of the revenue in BPO operations by 2022 as they do today, and will be contributing $20.4 billion from the total of predicted $38.9-billion revenues seen by that year.
This will be followed by global in-house centers with a $7.6-billion revenue haul by 2022; information technology and outsourcing, with $5.7 billion; and health-information management, with a revenue take of $5 billion. Revenues for the HIM sector in the country were estimated at $2.4 billion, with 118,000 personnel in 2016.
Meanwhile, the broader IT-BPM industry hit $22.9 billion worldwide, with manpower reaching 1.15 million in 2016, and still projects to reach $38.9 billion and 1.8 million personnel by 2022.