When communication breaks down, patients pay

Most of the time, when healthcare communication fails, the cost is small and private: a repeated test, a prescription taken wrong for a while. But zoom out, and the pattern stops looking like bad luck. Communication failure is one of the most consistently documented sources of avoidable harm and avoidable cost in modern healthcare.

What follows is just the numbers, with sources.

Errors follow broken handovers

The Joint Commission, which accredits US hospitals, put the figure in a safety alert on handovers: 80% of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers during the handover of patients.¹ The information existed. It just didn’t survive the journey from one person to the next.

Patients themselves are part of that chain. A hospitalised patient who faces communication barriers (language, hearing, cognition, or simply not understanding what’s happening) is three times more likely to experience a preventable adverse event than a patient without those barriers.²

The financial tail is long. Communication failures were a factor in 30% of the US malpractice cases CRICO Strategies examined for its benchmarking report, and those cases carried $1.7 billion in malpractice costs and 1,744 deaths over five years.³

Not understanding is expensive

Health literacy, the ability to understand and use health information, turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of how someone fares in the system. People with low health literacy have a 50% higher chance of hospitalisation, stay in hospital around two days longer, and incur healthcare costs up to four times higher than health-literate patients. Across the US economy, the estimated cost is up to $238 billion every year.⁴

Nor is this a minority experiencing difficulty at the edges. In England, 43% of working-age adults can’t fully understand health information written for the public, and once numbers are involved that rises to 61%.⁵ The material is pitched above the people it’s for.

The NHS pays too, one empty chair at a time

Closer to home, the cost shows up in appointments that simply don’t happen. NHS England reports that more than 15 million general-practice appointments are wasted each year because patients don’t attend and don’t give enough notice to offer the slot to someone else, about one in twenty. Around 7.2 million of those are appointments with the GPs themselves; at an average of £30 each, that alone is over £216 million a year and more than 1.2 million GP hours.⁶

Hospital clinics fare no better: of the 103 million outpatient appointments booked in 2021/22, 7.6% ended in a “did not attend”, an average of 650,000 missed slots every month.⁷ Behind many of those empty chairs are ordinary coordination failures: the letter that went to the wrong address, the carer juggling three people’s diaries who dropped exactly one ball.

Where Seenly sits in this

Very little of the above happens because people don’t care or don’t know medicine. It happens in the connective tissue, in handovers and in information that lived in one person’s head and never made it anywhere else. Connective tissue is buildable, and the patient’s side of it is where Seenly works: appointments, questions and medication lists held in one place, and the conversation itself recorded with consent so the instructions outlive the room. What was said stays available for whoever needs it next.

Seenly is not a medical device and it doesn’t give medical advice. And the research above measures the problem, not our product. It says nothing about whether we’ve fixed any of it.

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Sources

1. The Joint Commission, Sentinel Event Alert 58: Inadequate hand-off communication (2017).
2. The Cost of Not Addressing the Communication Barriers Faced by Hospitalized Patients, PMC (2019).
3. CRICO Strategies, Malpractice Risks in Communication Failures: 2015 Annual Benchmarking Report, reported by Harvard Risk Management Foundation, Communication failures linked to 1,744 deaths in five years (2016).
4. Center for Health Care Strategies, Health Literacy Fact Sheets.
5. Rowlands G et al., A mismatch between population health literacy and the complexity of health information, British Journal of General Practice (2015).
6. NHS England, Missed GP appointments costing NHS millions (2019).
7. NHS England, Reducing did not attends (DNAs) in outpatient services.