The Cost of Inefficient Health-Care Communications

The Cost of Inefficient Health-Care Communications

The top reasons why respondents say they communicate inefficiently are: Pagers not efficient: 52%, Text messaging not allowed: 39%, Wi-Fi not available: 37%, E-mail not efficient: 35%, BYOD not allowed: 25%, Faxing not efficient: 18%

Admitting one patient takes an average of 51 minutes. Of that, 33 minutes are wasted because of inefficient communications. Result: An annual loss of $728,000 per U.S. hospital.

It takes 93 minutes, on average, to coordinate an emergency response team for one patient. Of that, 40 minutes are wasted due to inefficient communications. That’s an annual loss of $265,000 per hospital.

Transferring a patient from a hospital to home care or a hospice takes about 56 minutes, of which 35 minutes are wasted. Annual cost: $754,000 per hospital.

$1.75 million per hospital is lost each year because of inefficient labor practices, according to the report.

Respondents agree that secure text messaging could increase productivity and eliminate about half of the economic loss of inefficient communications.

The extrapolated economic value of these time savings could be $918,000 annually per hospital and $5.88 billion annually across the industry. Patient admissions: $2.3 billion, Emergency response: $0.93 billion, Patient transfers: $2.7 billion

Estimated annual cost savings using text messaging for clinical communications for 6,409 U.S. hospitals: Patient admissions: 16 minutes, $385,598 in time saved, Emergency response: 22 minutes, $144,693 in time saved, Patient transfers: 20 minutes, $414,834 in time saved