Dive Brief:
- A new survey has concluded that the average U.S. hospital loses $1.7 million a year due to poor communication and coordination between staff members, and that these communication problems may be costing hospitals nationwide up to $11 billion.
- The survey, by the Ponemon Institute and IT vendor Imprivata, found that providers wasted 54% of the time involved in patient admissions, transfers and coordination of emergency response teams while waiting on answers to questions from other staff members. This problem occurs, in part, due to a lack of secure text messaging and other forms of quick, secure communication, researchers concluded.
- The survey also found that a heavy reliance on pagers is a major culprit in wasted hospital staff time, burning through 33 minutes during admissions, 40 minutes while coordinating emergency responses and 35 minutes during transfers.
Dive Insight:
Healthcare leaders already understand that pagers are an outmoded form of technology which waste time in critical situations. However, secure texting applications—though available from a growing number of vendors—have not yet caught the attention of many hospitals. This is the case despite the fact that technologies like secure texting can cut 58 minutes from workflow in the three major areas studied by Ponemon and Imprivata.
Change seems inevitable, however. If hospitals do invest in technologies that speed up communication by 58 minutes, they could save $918,000 per hospital and $5.88 billion across the entire healthcare system annually, the study found. And while the researchers didn't give a specific estimate, it seems likely that better coordination across ACO partners could save even more. Given these realities, it seems likely that mass adoption of secure texting technology is coming soon.