Patient safety is a health system’s smartest investment

“First, do no harm” may be the most well-known adage in the medical profession, but it’s far more than an admonishment. Preventing harm by investing in patient safety is a smart business strategy that returns incalculable direct and indirect financial benefits.

I’ve recently heard accounts of large health systems shrinking their safety teams and firing safety officers to get ahead of budget cuts. That’s not just alarming from a safety perspective; it’s ineffective in its intent to save money.

The counterintuitive reality is it’s expensive to provide unsafe care. In healthcare, like in other high-risk and complex industries, you either invest in safety up front or pay a much higher bill — and the tragic human toll — on the back end.

First and most importantly, investing in safety means fewer adverse events and better patient outcomes, reducing costs associated with avoidable readmissions, extended hospital stays, costly follow-up care, and potential malpractice claims. One study estimated that preventable adverse events in hospitals cost the United States $17.1 billion each year. Globally, unsafe care consumes up to 12.6% of total health spending in high-income countries, costing approximately $878 billion annually. 

By nature, systems that prioritize patient safety prioritize cost savings. A total systems approach to safety examines how all components of an organization interact, including people, the physical environment, technology, policies and procedures. This enables organizations to streamline their entire operation by identifying dangerous work arounds. This reduces unnecessary redundancies and strengthens workflows, making them safer, more efficient and less costly.

Safety initiatives also support clinician well-being by preventing harm, building resiliency and supporting efficiency. This is critical, as physician burnout and turnover cost the United States an estimated $4.6 billion each year.

Proactive safety initiatives to prevent harm can address this crisis by helping organizations move from a punitive culture — which punishes individual clinicians for errors, undermines morale and stifles safety reporting — to a “just culture” — which redesigns broken workflows that fuel errors and fosters continuous learning. 

These efforts can reduce unnecessary administrative burden, identify pain points in clinicians’ routines, and boost morale by making employees feel seen, heard and supported. With better support and increased well-being, clinicians are less likely to leave their position, forcing their employer to spend resources finding and onboarding a new hire.

Better outcomes, better processes, and better clinician and patient experiences add up to a better reputation. The payoff of a good brand is almost impossible to enumerate, helping organizations enable patient growth, attract top physician talent, and increase revenue over time. A stellar brand is hard to build but easy to destroy. All it takes is one high-profile incident to bring years, even decades, of work tumbling down. These high stakes make proactive investments in patient safety even more critical.

Preventing falls is one scenario where these payoffs of patient safety investments are readily apparent. Falls are the leading cause of injury for older adults, resulting in more than 41,000 deaths each year. In addition to this human impact, it’s estimated that a single inpatient fall can cost a healthcare facility more than $62,000 — not including potential litigation.

Meanwhile, relatively low-cost investments in safety, like infrastructure to report and analyze fall events and systems-based improvement efforts, can drastically reduce harm and liability. One aging services organization managed to reduce falls by 11% after investing in new safety protocols, saving $2.7 million in fall-related claims and litigation in just 18 months.

Patient harm, workforce burnout, trust erosion and reputation loss — while intangible, these are very real costs that health systems must bear. Investing in safer patient care is an investment in an organization’s future. It improves patient experience, increases Leapfrog and CMS performance scores, reduces workforce turnover, improves ratings on consumer sites like Google and Yelp, and helps grow the bottom line.

Simply put: When it comes to safety, doing the right thing from a human perspective is doing the smart thing from a business perspective. In an era of tightening budgets and cost-cutting, hospital and health system leaders should consider how investing in patient safety supports long-term financial goals.

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