Ascent offers 2,000 BPO jobs to nurses, health-care workers

To help bridge the unemployment gap in the Philippine health-care sector, homegrown recruitment, consulting and business process outsourcing, (BPO) firm Ascent is employing this year 2,000 Filipino medical workers, mostly nurses, and hopes to hire at least 20,000 of these professionals by 2021.

“Health care has a big outsourcing opportunity here in the Philippines. So meaning hindi mo na kailangang lumabas ng bansa para magtrabaho [you don’t need to go out of the country to wok],” Ascent President
and CEO Raphael Macapagal told the BusinessMirror in an interview.

In fact, he said registered nurses alone are being outsourced locally since hundreds of thousands of them are needed in the United States.

However, many of them still do not have work as evident in a report released two years ago that showed around 200,000 of these local talents are unemployed.

What’s hindering such untapped work force to try their luck in this so-called “sunshine” industry is their lack of understanding that healthcare is the fastest growing domain of the BPO sector requiring their clinical and hospital knowledge and discipline.

“This is not just a call center job,“ he stressed. “It’s the same thing [as their job description] and it pays good, as well, yet, it doesn’t have to be in a hospital setting.”

Through Ascent Pro—its new recruitment arm incepted in February 2016 – the company offers various job positions including clinical analyst utilization manager, intake coordinator, medical encoder, medical biller, disease manager and insurance coordinator.

“These are all demands from our partner-companies here all servicing the US [health-care market],” the top executive said. Over the last three months, around 400 to 500 health workers have been already hired, of which 90 percent are deployed to partner—customers and around 10 percent are absorbed by the company
itself to serve its American clients

Source: BusinessMirror