M A I N   N E W S

Special to the tribune
UK outsourcing to ring in windfall for Indian call centres
Shyam Bhatia in London

Indian call centres are poised to reap a massive windfall in extra earnings during the coming financial year as the UK government’s biggest spending department seeks new ways to save money.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which has an annual budget of £104 billion, is under orders to achieve 20 per cent savings by 2014.

Health service managers believe this will be best achieved by outsourcing more NHS administration to Indian call centres and data bases that are cheaper to run than their UK counterparts.

The alternative is cuts to services, including longer queues and waiting times for those in the UK who require their health needs to be addressed.

Currently, a UK government-backed company called NHS Shared Business Services (SBS) has some 700 Indian employees in Delhi and Pune that handle invoices, data entry and administration.

The work they have done so far has been of a sufficiently high standard as to earn the glowing praise of SBS managing director John Neilson, who told The Times, “There isn’t a capability issue, there’s more a local UK sensitivity issue.”

Neilson was commenting on the British public’s reluctance so far to allow extra personal health details to be outsourced to Indian and any other foreign call centres.

“There is no clinical data, medical record data or anything with that level of sensitivity or anything that involves direct customer contact, none of that sort of activity happens in India,” Neilson explained. “We’re sensitive to the market need that people feel more comfortable with that sort of data being managed in the UK,” he added.

Although Neilson and some fellow health professionals would like to see much more work devolved on India, others are less happy about the prospect. Among the critics is Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the patients association, who observes that outsourcing can be a false economy if the system becomes less responsive to patients’ needs.

One of the savings ideas under discussion, that was subsequently abandoned, was to save £600 million by creating a national call centre - one that could be outsourced - for doctors’ appointments.

“Outsourcing more back office functions to India might be something that people will look at and the NHS might save money,” commented Nigel Edwards, acting chief executive of the NHS Confederation. “But the issue is a tricky one - it would be nard to see how a central call centre for GPs could be made to work. UK jobs would be lost and patients, who largely want convenient health care services based close to home, may not accept it.”

How and when more NHS back office functions are outsourced to India in the future has still to be worked out, but India is also expected to be the beneficiary of a massive expansion in medical tourism.

According to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), medical tourism could generate annual revenues of US$ 2,4 billion by 2012.

In both the UK and the US, health service experts have noted the success of hospitals like Bangalore-based Dr Devi Shetty’s 1,0000-bed Narayana Hruduyalaya cardiac centre that carried out 6,000 operations last year.

Dr Shetty is quoted in Western health journals as saying, “Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That’s what we are doing in health care. What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation.”

Most satisfying for Dr Shetty are the statistics for patient survival in his hospital. At Narayana Hrudayalaya, the reported mortality rate was 1.4 per cent within 30 days of coronary artery bypass graft surgery. This compared with an average of 1.9 per cent in the US in 2008, according to the Chicago-based Society of Thoracic Surgeons.