Firms finally are beginning to accept - even embrace - the idea of sending call center jobs home. But other types of back-office jobs? No way.

Yes, way. Certain industries, initially healthcare and insurance, are beginning to move a variety of other jobs home, too. Take a $55 million health clinic in the Kansas City area. Just three months after it outsourced its call center operation to ARO Outsourcing, the clinic came back and said, in effect, "You've exceeded our expectations. We're sold on the virtual model. Help us move every department we can home."

Today, ARO is transitioning the clinic's appointment scheduling, doctor paging, patient insurance pre-certification and payment collection tasks to its home-based agents. "They were having the same problems in these departments as in its call center," says ARO CEO Michael Amigoni. "They couldn't hire the right people. Turnover was so high that quality suffered. Why not use the same virtual model to fix it?"

The big reason is that companies don't think they can measure performance. They're comfortable with virtual call centers because agent quality and productivity is easy to measure. You can monitor calls and require agents to take 25 calls per hour, keeping each under 2 minutes, for instance. But firms don't readily know how to apply performance metrics to other jobs.

"With this client, we asked, 'What existing metrics do you have?'" Amigoni says. In the case of insurance pre-certification, each clerk is assigned a doctor or group of doctors whose patients the clerk must certify within a 24-hour period. Then, ARO helped uncover deeper metrics by accessing database stats that showed, among other things, the number of pre-certifications each clerk handled daily.

"If you can't measure performance, you probably have a workflow problem," Amigoni says. "It's a matter of getting enough knowledge about an industry, identifying what tasks need to be done, and moving them out. Add a metric, and rock and roll."

Kistner is the managing editor of the Net.Worker section of Network World. She can be reached at tkistner@nww.com.