Comments on: Foreign Call Centers Phone Home

By: dennis fliegelman

dennis fliegelman — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:22:30 +0000

Healthcare providers who think they are HIPAA compliant but call for medical claim information should be concerned about oversea call centers. We all need to deman the location of the customer service rep. or to speak to someone in the continental U.S. And you can no longer rely on foreign accents as some call centers are in Nova Scotia Canada. It is not HIPAA compliant to provide any information to these overseas call centers.

Even though the representatives in these centers will assure you that they are HIPAA trained, unless you know that their country provides relevant legal protections and regulations you may be violating HIPAA.. India and the Philippines do not have these protections which include data breach notification and data protection laws, or they exclude the call centers from these laws.

Apart from the obvious impact on unemployemnt and the risks of giving protected information to call centers outside of the U.S., we are also allowing the Companies to avoid the related Federal and State taxes, Social Security and Medicare contributions, jeopardizing these as well..

By: Thoughtyouknew

Thoughtyouknew — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:59:39 +0000

@ JCWEAVEAVER, I often call BCBS of California and get routed to an overseas call center. Alot of times I hang up because I have a difficult time asking questions in a manner that can be understood by these overseas agents. Since it’s behavioral health, it often involves diagnosis and exclusions, serious mental illness vs non serious mental illnesses. They just get confused when i go into details like that. I just ask for a supervisor before I lose it.

By: The_Mick

The_Mick — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:35:50 +0000

I think most of us can tell stories of frustration with foreign phone reps. The worst case I saw was when my sister got a Dell computer when that awful Windows Vista operating system was full of bugs. The phone rep got the problem entirely wrong and sent a Dell tech to the house for the wrong reason. The Dell tech got on the phone to straighten it out and even he couldn’t get the Indian phone rep to understand what he was saying. The frustrated tech solved the problem by shipping my sister a new computer.

By: howdymo1

howdymo1 — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:18:26 +0000

The fact that the workers in India, China and other countries are starting to ask for more money is the telling story in the idea of bringing jobs back to the US. It was only a matter of time. I saw David Muirs report about the Chinese asking for $3.00 an hour (soon to be $6.00). This plays a big part in the decision to bring jobs home. Now they have figured out that the American worker is 3 to 4 times more productive than the Chinese or Indian workers.

By: davalias

davalias — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:40:32 +0000

Mr Muir,

What about IT jobs? Our IT jobs are now outsourced to India and lots of companies prefer recruit Indian people to work here eventhough they don’t have greencards. These companies will give them greencards and they can bring their families too.

By: glacia

glacia — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:29:51 +0000

@Vicki – You may or may not be right about the loyal workers however that isn’t why jobs are outsourced. That comes directly back to us the consumers. We as consumers look for the lowest price. And American workers cost a premium when compared to foreign workers. My own company does a large amount of assembly work in Malaysia and it’s done as well as anyone here could do but at a significant lower cost. Would we have kept the jobs here if there were any possible way at all? Of course. But it was absolutely impossible to compete and pay 3500 people 10-15 times as much. It truly would have and put the company out of business to keep assembly jobs in the US and it nearly did because every competitor in our field was doing it already. And our customers right here in the US were moving to the lower priced products. Know what interesting thing I noticed while I was in Malaysia…. Malaysians buy Malaysian made products with pride. We in the US do not.

By: glacia

glacia — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:18:26 +0000

But does this mean they will actually communicate any better? I’m very skeptical.

By: Vicki

Vicki — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:06:38 +0000

Any jobs that come back to the USA are great. Companies should come back and they will have loyal and very good workers who are thankful for work. So bring jobs back to America for our nation and our people.

By: jcweaver

jcweaver — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:15:21 +0000

Dear David,

I used to work for Blue Cross of California for several years. All the time, I ran into out of country calls who tried to confirm eligibility and claim info on members. As soon as their own info was verified, I proceeded to handle the calls. What galled me was local doctors and hospitals went out of country to verify members who was instate, not out of country. I couldn’t count how many times HIPAA was broken, but, because provider info was verfified, I was to proceed with the calls. We mutually parted ways a few years ago.

There was much conflict within my unit about the call centers put abroad, due to the calls from our customers. One thing to note: oversea providers who try to use other names other than their own, already had a black mark on them. No one wanted to talk to India who tried to use Latin names as identifiers for their call care agents. Same thing was said about the call centers in the Phillipines. Our customers would call our center in the states to complain about our surrogates.

Unfortunately, since being out of the loop, I have no idea what they’re doing now, or their business practice. I only hope HIPAA would not further violoated by out of country callers who tried to verified members instate.

By: matyra

matyra — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:06:36 +0000

J Murphy, of course not all jobs are staying here. Every company has to do what’s best for them and their shareholders at the time. But, when you look at the numbers, for the first time in a long while the number of US manufacturing jobs is growing. Apparently manufacturers are learning that quality is more important than quantity. This article isn’t about manufacturing, but the meme is the same. It’s becoming cheaper, and better, to do things here.