The financial and clinical-risk case for medical rostering software

We know that a finance team sometimes needs more convincing than the doctors who use our system. In November we wrote a blog post about our spreadsheet template that potential customers can use to assess costs and benefits for HosPortal for their own hospitals. We have now refined it further to make it even better and more robust.

Robust financial analysis of the benefits of HosPortal

We have recently had the opportunity to work with a medium-sized hospital group on their business case, using real data about current staffing, activities, risks and problems. This caused us to considerably enhance the template, and gave us further insight into how HosPortal helps our customers.The analysis showed that the benefits for that hospital group were in four areas, as shown in this chart:

1. Significantly improve efficiency. One fifth of the benefit was in the reduction of the time spent by the administrative team that manage, publish and change the rosters. In fact, we estimated that the time spent by the various people managing rosters could be reduced by over 90%.
2. Better for doctors. Over half of the benefit was in the time saved by doctors:
   • For roster participants, in picking shifts and administering their own roster obligations
   • For doctors during their working day, to identify and contact other doctors quickly and easily.
   • For senior doctors who review and approve the roster before it is published, or when changes need to be made, to considerably reduce the time required to provide feedback and give a final approval.
3. Reduce risk and and increased reliability. About a quarter of the value was the intangible benefits associated with reduced risk and increased reliability: improved transparency and accuracy of the roster, reduced chance of doctors being unavailable when on call, the ability to change the roster in real time 24 hours per day, and the availability of audit reports on roster changes and outbound communications.
4. Eliminate duplication. There was also the benefit of eliminating the costs for the software and tools being used currently.

Quick payback

On the commercial terms proposed for this particular customer, the benefits each year were about three times the license fee for the software. For you finance-minded readers, the payback period was a few months and it worked out to have a triple-digit IRR. (The even more sophisticated readers will have worked out from this data that there was an up-front payment for some customisation)We’d love to talk though these examples, or share our improved cost-benefit analysis template. Please get in touch!