What is paper-charting costing you?

Written by: Austin Riddaugh, VP of Business Development

Like any well-run business, ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) often have a tight grip on all expenses, ensuring the financial wellbeing of the organization, stakeholders, employees, and ultimately, their patients.

That is why we often hear initial pushback when talking about digitizing the patient surgical charts. Many think, “It seems like a nice to have, not a need to have.”. We recently had our prospects and customers conduct a return-on-investment analysis, and the findings may just surprise you.

Before jumping into the numbers, it is important to understand that paper charting (and the associated workflow) is indeed costing you money today. While we feel that our solution is one of the most economical solutions on the market, no company can compete against $0.00! I’m here to share that paper charting is not costing you $0.00.

Where do these costs come from? Well first comes the obvious line items such as paper, carbon copy forms, ink, shredding, storage space, labels, folders, etc. However, the numbers really start to stack up when you include the time you are paying employees to construct, deconstruct, scan, shred, and shuffle these charts, day in and day out. And we won’t even get into the opportunity cost of repurposing these staffers to do more efficient, revenue-producing tasks.

One surgery center customer of Shareable doing roughly 1,600 annual procedures reported that their annual paper-charting costs (using many of the same metrics mentioned above) were $29,770, or $18.61 per case. Another center doing 12,000 annual procedures reported spending a whopping $117,559, or $9.80 per case.

I would encourage every facility to do their own homework and determine just how much they are spending by charting on paper. It may surprise you!

But as we discussed above, it’s not all about the money. There isn’t not enough time or space to include all of the benefits for a center coming off of paper and adopting ShareableFORMS. Increased efficiency, visibility, and accuracy are just a few of the many perks. And that’s what makes this job so fun, getting to play a role in improving the quality of care in healthcare facilities, all while saving these businesses money!

So again, how much is paper-charting costing you? It would be well worth your time and money to find out.

To learn more about ShareableFORMS, send us an email at sales@shareableforms.com.