Medical outsourcing is a business process used by organizations like hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare provider practices to obtain physician, nursing, healthcare technician, or other services in a managed services model.
Outsourcing of emergency department physicians, as well as radiologists and anesthesiologists in operating rooms, grew rapidly in the United States in the 2000s due a combination of several economic forces, and medical staffing companies developed niche expertise in various medical specialties.
[3][4][5] Physician outsourcing has led to an increase in the number of people who received catastrophically large medical bills due to the outsourced physicians billing at out of network rates.
[6][7] A doctor in Tampa Bay claimed in 2015 that an emergency department she was staffing while working for a division of Envision Healthcare had chronically purchased the services of too few doctors, leading to excessive waiting times there.
[9][10][11] Some small practices have outsourced business functions to management services organizations.