Reverse Engineering Jobs to Lower Costs Yet Maintain Quality

Part Five/US Hospitals can't easily reduce their personnel costs...Indian hospitals already have

There are literally hundreds of healthcare professional societies in the US. There are hospital associations and societies for every imaginable job type. They all have various certifications and annual meetings and accreditations which seem to become inexorably woven into the human resource job descriptions over time.

When you diligently work at creating standards that require the most expensive human resource cost inputs for a given task...under the wildly waving banner of quality care ...you end up with some very expensive procedures. In the US, these costs are passed on year after year as reasonable and customary.

In India, where there is negligible market penetration by insurance carriers, patients are payers are better able to shop for medical procedures by comparing prices. In this true healthcare market, there is a continuous drive for maintaining quality and lower costs. To this end, hospitals have adopted the strategy of "de-skilling."

De-skilling is the mirror image of the US healthcare labor strategy. Every procedural function is reverse engineered, to determine the lowest level of training needed for a given task. De-skilling not only cuts costs by substituting lower-cost labor when possible, but it also addresses local labor shortages in skilled and trained personnel.

This is yet another cost saving strategy that would be nearly impossible to adopt in the US, as any gains realized would be wiped out with the very first law suit alleging failure to provide the prevailing standard of personnel for a task.