Quality - a major problem from Indian companies hungry for outsourced contracts?
Sunita Dubey, Special Correspondent
August 21, 2004 

Biggest challenge of outsourcing from India is Quality! In initial euphoria of newly found gold (cons reduction through outsourcing from India) many Western companies really forgot about the quality standards and marked difference in the same in India and the Western world. Many Indian companies are touting double data entry, electronic verification and so on. But experience of Western companies in recent days is very depressing. The problem is that Quality assurance is not just a mechanical process; it involves human being and really is a function of culture and work ethics.

The outsourcing of medical notes to Indian call centres to save money and speed up work at the National Health Service in Britain is leading to cases of confusion, a London daily claimed today. While some "lost in translation" mistakes are hilarious, trained medical secretaries warn that the consequences could be serious if drug quantities are wrongly heard. A drug for stomach ulcers called Lansoprazole was transcribed as the much more familiar holiday destination of Lanzarote. Information about a patient's "phlebitis" (vein inflammation) left leg" was typed out as "flea bite his left leg". A "below knee amputation" was transcribed as "baloney amputation" and "Eustachian tube (in the ear) malfunction" was given as "Euston station tube malfunction". Eight London hospitals are using or negotiating to use the services of Omni-medical, which employs a pool of secretaries in India to transcribe letters from tapes dictated by consultants. 

It is also estimated that innumerable software bugs created but never detected by Indian companies may have induced an artificial mega Y2K effects. These will come out in coming days and what was really feared ten years back in the form of Y2K might come true.