Your organization manages adverse events much like everyone else. Someone, likely a pretty high-functioning nurse, accumulates paper incident reports manually or from your EHR system. They periodically type them into a spreadsheet, then sort them and count the different types of incidents by community. They do a pretty good job of it, even though they complain that they aren’t very good at Excel, that some buildings don’t report consistently, and that they can’t get anybody’s attention with the results that are often murky at best compared to benchmarks that they can’t find.
Let’s put aside the qualitative aspects of incident reporting and let’s overlook the most important aspect of your current incident reporting and adverse event management process—that it doesn’t work as well as it should and could. Let’s focus on one simple thing: how much does it cost you?
The Costs of Your Incident Reporting
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the median salary for a registered nurse in 2014 was $66,640. The best-paid 10 percent of RNs made more than $98,880, while the bottom 10 percent earned less than $45,880.
So for simplicity’s sake, let’s say that your nurse makes $60,000 per year. We won’t count benefits or anything else, just the $60,000.
Let’s estimate what it takes your nurse to do incident reporting and analysis. According to our survey, communities spend over ten hours per week on average managing and analyzing incident reports and adverse events. Ten hours per week is 520 hours per year, but let’s round that down to 400 hours per year just to be conservative.
A full-time equivalent is 2,000 hours per year at $60,000 for our nurse. So 400 hours is one-fifth of that, or $12,000 for our annual nurse cost.
QA Reader currently retails for $2.00 per bed per year. For a 100-bed community, that would represent an annual cost of $2,000 per year.
The ROI of QA Reader
So the critical question is, How much time will you save by using QA Reader for incident reporting and analysis?
With QA Reader, the community and the nurse won’t need to:
- Input any incident data (we do it for you)
- Get a download from the EHR (if one is available)
- Flag frequent fallers, high-risk residents, or adverse events (QA Reader does that automatically)
- Research benchmarks (they're built into the system)
- Create reports and dashboards (part of the package)
That means with QA Reader, you gain benefits your nurse isn’t currently providing and you automate the rest. Just to be conservative, let’s say that instead of saving 400 hours, with QA Reader you might only save 200 hours.
Now let’s do the final math. Two hundred hours of nursing time savings is worth $6,000. QA Reader costs $2,000. That means that the ROI is 300%.
In other words, using every conservative measure at every turn in our analysis, QA Reader pays for itself in four months. Not four years—four months.
Benefits Beyond the Bottom Line
We don’t have time here to go into the intuitive dashboards and analytics. Or how QA Reader helps communities do more with less. Better care. Better focus. Better QA. Better managing.
Typically, teams look for ROI on software projects and purchases to be at or below a year. When your ROI is less than half of that—especially on a vetted product or when the quantitative and the qualitative both sync up—you gain a ton of confidence.
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