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Reader Question: I’m preparing to launch a firm that will offer financial services to the immigrant populations in the U.S. in their own languages. As such, outsourcing call center staff in the appropriate countries is an obvious advantage, both for cost and linguistic/cultural advantages. But this means dealing with a large quantity of small call centers around the world, rather than a few in India or another English speaking country. Do you have any input, regarding the challenges of this approach?
C.I.I.S.: It sounds like you are undertaking a very interesting initiative. There are many challenges to this approach, not the least of which is managing a large number of international vendors. An alternative is to set up a single call center in the U.S. in a city with a diverse immigrant population such as New York City or Los Angeles. While wages may be higher than offshoring, many hidden operating costs related to security and training may be avoided. Furthermore, the service providers will be even more in tune with the clients, and during the ramp up of your business, you will only be managing one domestic multilingual site.
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Research Highlights: Simon School Study Examines Economic Impact of Information Technology on Medical Imaging
Many service organizations have spent millions on information systems designed to improve performance. Yet despite the significant cost, there is scant research quantifying the benefits of these investments. Addressing this critical issue, Abraham Seidmann, Xerox Professor of Computers and Information Systems and Operations Management at the Simon School, and Atanu Lahiri, a Simon doctoral student, measured the impact of installing a Radiology Information System (R.I.S.) at the Borg Imaging Group, a large privately-owned network of free-standing medical imaging clinics. Borg, which manages more than 125,000 imaging procedures a year, recently replaced its homegrown software solutions with a newly developed R.I.S. by Carestream Health.
The study found that the benefits from implementing an R.I.S. were significant in several key tangible and intangible ways, including dramatic reductions in the turnaround times for reports, improved labor productivity, and increased satisfaction levels for both referring physicians and patients alike. Interestingly, these benefits were not realized uniformly. The evidence is clear that the R.I.S. significantly reduced the report turnaround time for digital mammography, but not for magnetic resonance imaging, though neither Borg management nor the R.I.S. vendor fully understood why.
Using novel queuing models, Seidmann and Lahiri identified the decoupling of information-gathering from information-processing in the digital mammography studies as the main source of performance improvements. When successfully implemented, the software can safely facilitate the shifting of information processing or gathering tasks to different points in the process making more efficient use of the staff based upon their knowledge, expense and availability.
The initial findings of the study have two salient implications for the next generation of medical software systems: (a) leveraging a technology may require shifting the burden of work, which, in turn, may require organizational changes, such as redefining tasks and realigning the incentives of participants along the workflow, and (b) workflow integration and information system design should properly trade-off data collection and coding efforts with the added value of information delivery to clinical and administrative users downstream. These findings have already been embraced by the R.I.S. vendor in designing future upgrades.
For more information contact Professor Seidmann via E-mail at avi.seidmann@simon.rochester.edu.
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