Question

Do the benefits of outsourcing outweigh the risks? Order the highly ranked outsourced services from riskiest to least risky, and explain your rationale for the decision. If you were the Director of an HIT department would you feel comfortable outsourcing or do you think it would open your organization up to greater liability? Defend your response.

Answer 1

The benefit or the risk actually depends on the type of service that you plan to outsource. For example, sensitive data related operation such as banking, may not be suitable in this matter. Because the risks will outweigh the benefits. However, if you want to outsource the customer reception desk, then that may not be too risky.

It will be difficult to list all the outsourcing services in ranked order. However the commonly outsourced services are human resources, payroll, public relations, manufacturing, customer service, taxation/bookkeeping, software development, legal services, and many more. If we choose a few from here and rank them in the order of riskiest to least risky they will be

• Payroll: riskiest because may involve working with sensitive data of employees
• Manufacturing: high risk of IP infringement
• Taxation/book keeping; accounting and financial matters gets exposed to the consultant
• Software development: comparatively low risk but still possible cause some damage through increasing vulnerability
• Legal services: lower risk due to confidentiality agreement
• Customer service: lowest risk service

If I was a director of HIT department, I would need to ask a few key questions before outsourcing. They would be

• Which service/project needs to be outsourced?
• Will it contain sensitive data?
• Do we have enough supervisory experience to build this in house?
• Will the quality be better or worse with an outsourced project?
• Cost/benefit in terms of confidentiality, quality, and financials?

These are some of the questions that needs to be asked. If it relates to outsourcing some development or installation work that will require the vendor to have access to our sensitive patient information, then I would decide against outsourcing. But if the project had non-sensitive information and provided better quality with comparable budget and time, then I would consider outsourcing the work.