American Healthcare Waiting Time at $240 Billion

Alan Krueger, Princeton University, has touched a raw nerve. Patients are no longer patient. In fact, some of them are sending doctors and hospitals bills for their waiting time.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey, Krueger calculated that Americans age 15 and older collectively spent 847 million hours waiting for medical services to be provided in 2007.  He went on to conclude that if we value all people’s time at the average hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory workers ($17.43 in 2007), Americans spent the equivalent of $240 billion on health care in 2007.

Put another way, omitting patients’ time caused national health care expenditures to be undercounted by 11 percent in 2007.

That’s a lot of bills to be delivered to health care providers.

Obviously, no provider is going to be paying out any of these invoices anytime soon.

But it does point out a critical flaw in the customer experience that providers are missing. Making patients wait does not make them patient; it makes them mad. They value their time just as much as professionals in the system value their time.

Waiting time seen from an internal point of view has a real cost associated with it. If an OR rents out at $500 a minute then a turnaround of 20 minutes adds $10,000 to the cost of operations. If the team is sloppy, that can easily double to $20,000. The cumulative cost of wait time is a huge cost — in the millions of dollars.

When hospital teams are slow in turning around an operating room between surgeries, surgeons are unhappy, anesthesiologists are unhappy, OR nurses are unhappy, staff is unhappy, patients and their families are unhappy. In this modern world where satisfaction is an important factor in how hospitals are evaluated, wait time equals unhappy customers.

Reducing waiting time in surgical services should be on the target list of every COO, CMO and CNO.  The clock is ticking.

Filed Under: News & Careers