Exploring the value of time in clinical settings today

Clinicians are focused on delivering quality patient care. This has become especially true with the surge in patients due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Unfortunately, healthcare technology is often designed in ways that take valuable time away from clinicians. For example, usernames and passwords, which are meant to protect the privacy and security of PHI and other sensitive data, often act as a barrier between clinicians and their patients.

Previous research from Imprivata has found that clinicians spend on average more than 45 minutes per shift, per day, logging into clinical systems, including workstations, virtual desktops, and applications. This inefficiency directly impacts the quality of patient care and can lead to clinical burnout. Understanding this has prompted several healthcare organizations to recognize that any unnecessary burden on clinicians, especially now amidst a global pandemic, is simply unacceptable.

Two reports have been recently published in The Journal of Hospital Administration and The Journal of Nursing Administration to examine the relationship between clinical systems and time spent at keyboard logins:

• Easing hospitalist electronic health record burden through clinical workstation single sign-on
• Electronic Health Record Workstation Single Sign-on

The primary author of both reports, Dr. George Gellert, MD, MPH, MPA, previously served as CMIO at CHRISTUS Health. As a clinician, he witnessed first-hand the amount of time it would take to log into clinical systems. One popular solution to login challenges has been single sign-on (SSO) technology. To explore the efficacy of this solution, he and his team studied 19 acute care facilities across the CHRISTUS Health network, measuring how much time clinicians were spending with keyboards at login with and without SSO.

His team’s findings revealed that after implementing SSO, clinical logins at the beginning of each shift decreased by an average of 5.3 seconds, while reconnect (i.e. subsequent logins throughout their shift) login times decreased by an average of 20.4 seconds. This resulted in annual time savings between 10,302 and 13,245 hours. Factoring in the average annual wage of clinical staff, the result was between $1.1M to $1.4M in financial value of time saved.

Imprivata solutions are designed with healthcare workflows in mind to ensure maximum time savings, security, and data privacy. More than 2,100 healthcare organizations and over 6 million clinicians across the world rely on Imprivata for fast, secure access to clinical systems. You can calculate your own time savings here or contact us to learn more about our solutions.