Healthcare provider burden reduction and estimated cost savings realized with electronic case reporting...

Our study aims to assess the time-cost burden reduction of transitioning from manual case reporting to electronic case reporting (eCR) for COVID-19 among healthcare organizations (HCOs) over a 1-year period.

The study included 3 HCOs from different states with a total of 204 healthcare facilities that had a mixture of hospital and ambulatory providers. We conducted semi-structured interviews, data collection, and analyses of healthcare provider hours spent manually reporting COVID-19 cases along with hours spent implementing and maintaining eCR over 1-year periods. We calculated the time-cost burden of both manual case reporting, and eCR implementation and maintenance to assess the burden reduction of switching from manual to eCR.

The number of provider hours reduced by switching from manual case reporting to eCR was 16 942 hours for HCO1, 14 145 hours for HCO2, and 2933 hours for HCO3. Burden reduction of provider hours that eCR offered translated into an estimated $827 120 for HCO1, $569 424 for HCO2, and $78 540 for HCO3, where HCO3 is a small, Federally Qualified Health Center.

To our knowledge, this is the first time a nationwide information technology innovation was shown to directly reduce the administrative provider time burden and cost of manual case reporting on HCOs.

By automating patient case reporting, eCR reduced provider burden hours by at least 16-fold and cost savings of 4-fold or higher over a 1-year period.