1. $8.3 Billion Lost by Healthcare From Poor Communication
by Jim Bloedau
By Jim Bloedau of Information Advantage Group
November 1, 2013
In the early days of modern manufacturing, value was only added
to a product about 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time it
was sitting on the production line waiting for the next step to add
value – a large portion of this waste came from information not
being readily available.
If we look at the process a patient goes through when receiving
care at a medical center we will find similarities. A 2013 Ponemon
Institute survey of 577 U.S. health care professionals found
clinicians wasting an average of 46 minutes per day waiting for
patient information. The primary reasons included no Wi-Fi access, bans on use of personally owned
devices and reliance on email and inefficient pagers. That adds up to $5.1 billion annually across the
health care industry or a productivity loss of $900,000 per year for the typical hospital. Additionally, the
study found that hospitals waste $3.2 billion by continuing to rely on these older communications systems
as part of the patient discharge process – about a third of the average discharge time of 102 minutes is
due to waiting for hospital staff to respond with information necessary for the patient's release. Overall
this is costing U.S. hospitals an estimated $8.3 billion annually in lost productivity and increased patient
discharge times.
This struggle to get the right information at the right time is endemic in every industry. For healthcare,
CHIN’s in the 90s and RHIOs in the 2000s attempted to pull information together from various trading
partners. HIEs are today’s permutation and they still suffer from scaling one technological and
cooperative summit only to find that their efforts offered a better view of the next under anticipated
problem – mostly a sustainable business model.
More recently we see video, voice and data systems in the form of telehealth, mHealth, healthcare grade
SMS and email, and remote care applications and devices showing good productivity returns from early
demonstrations funded by HITECH. However, these grants fall short on helping all players coming
together [e.g. specialist and ancillary care]. In this environment, all are eager for successful business
models that support data exchange efforts beyond enabling legislation and grants. When payers, patients
and caregivers have collaborated and shared the cost savings from technology that produces greater
throughput, less waste and most appropriate care, great changes have occurred in market perceptions
and profitability - the Veterans Administration, Kaiser, Group Health Cooperatives and other provider
entities have all done so without any government grants.
I think we are all comfortable with approaching summits of concern for privacy, security and patient
consent – we’ve scaled them many times in the past. Yet, much of the discussion centers on trying to sell
improved communications like they were selling a super highway -- difficult to do when the average
provider community only sees, wants or can afford a cow path.