Manual Vitals Audit

What is manual vital sign entry costing your facility?

Answer five quick questions to estimate the annual staff time, labor cost, and correction burden tied to manual documentation.

Your facility

Tell us about your workflow

Name of Facility

How many residents have their vitals taken?

residents

How many rounds of vitals are taken each day?

rounds / day

Which vitals are taken during each round?

Blood Pressure SpO₂ Temperature

Are readings written down before someone manually enters them into the EHR?

Yes No

“Yes” includes time to write each reading and enter it into the EHR.
“No” means the readings are only manually entered into the EHR.

Hourly Nursing Wage ($)

$ / hour

Manual Documentation Error Rate (%)Manual entry has an 18.75% error rate. Adjust if needed.

Minutes to Correct One Documentation Error3 minutes to find and correct an error. Adjust if needed.

minutes

Your estimate

Annual Cost of Manual Vital Entry

273,750Manual Vital Entries Annually

517 (or 22 days)Manual Entry Hours Annually

$15,513Manual Entry Labor Cost Annually

51,328Documentation Errors Annually

2,566 (or 107 days)Hours Correcting Documentation Errors

$76,992Documentation Error Labor Cost

Total Estimated Annual Labor Cost$92,505

Manually entering vital signs and fixing mistakes is estimated to cost your facility about $92,505 in labor each year.

The impact goes beyond labor cost. Your staff spends about 0 days each year entering vital signs and fixing mistakes. That is about 0% of a full year of staff time that could be spent caring for residents instead.

Based on what you entered, your staff manually enters 273,750 vital sign numbers each year. This takes about 517 hours of staff time and costs your facility about $15,513 a year.

With a manual entry error rate of 18.75%, about 51,328 mistakes could happen each year when staff enters those vital signs.

Finding and fixing those mistakes could take about 2,566 additional staff hours each year, based on 3 minutes per mistake. That could cost your facility another $76,992 a year in staff time.

This estimate uses 365 days per year, 3.4 seconds per documentation action, the entered hourly nursing wage, the entered manual documentation error rate, and the entered average correction time. Actual results may vary.