Here’s a draft article (with a bit of edge, as you asked) on how interruptions in health care settings increase risk to staff and patients — and ultimately make insurance costs go up — grounded in findings from “Sidetracks on the Safety Express: Interruptions Lead to …” (PMC4357347) and related research.
Interruptions: The Hidden Hazard in Health Care
When I say “interruptions,” you might picture someone popping into your office for five seconds. In a hospital or long-term care setting? It’s a whole other beast. According to Sidetracks on the Safety Express: Interruptions Lead to …, interruptions and distractions in health care are pervasive. (PubMed Central)
These aren’t benign little annoyances. They have ripple effects — putting staff under pressure, increasing the probability of error, compromising patient safety, and ultimately imposing extra costs — including on insurers. Let’s walk through the chain.
The Anatomy of Interruptions in Health Care
First, some context from the Grissinger article:
- Interruptions come from many directions — coworkers, patients, families/visitors, alarms, paging systems, electronic health record (EHR) alerts, telephones. (PubMed Central)
- They’re frequent. Health care workers are interrupted multiple times per hour. (ISMIE)
- Not all interruptions are equal: some are urgent or needed, but many are low priority or irrelevant to the immediate task. (PubMed Central)
So picture a nurse doing med prep, a physician reviewing orders, or someone documenting in the EHR. Every ping, question, or unexpected patient request can jostle their focus.
How Interruptions Elevate Risk for Staff & Patients
1. Cognitive load and memory interference
Switching tasks (even briefly) forces the brain to hold multiple threads in memory. When you get pulled away, you might forget where you were, skip a step, or mis-assign a value. That’s a classic “lost in the weeds” moment. Research on nursing interruptions frames them as a “harmful factor for patient safety.” (PubMed Central)
2. Errors and omissions increase
Interrupted clinicians are more prone to mistakes — wrong med dosage, charting errors, omissions in follow-up, forgetting double-checks. Studies show that interruptions correlate strongly with procedural errors. (PubMed Central)
3. Time delays, inefficiencies, and restarts
After being interrupted, the clinician must stop, orient to the interruption, then re-orient to the original task — that “re-orientation” has a cost. Time is lost, flow is broken, momentum is disrupted. Tasks take longer or require multiple starts.
4. Stress, fatigue, burnout
Consistent interruptions pile on mental fatigue and stress for care staff. Over time, that accelerates burnout, which itself is a risk factor for errors and turnover.
5. Cascading adverse events
One mistake or omission can lead to a cascade: a medication error → adverse drug event → increased morbidity or length of stay → more intense monitoring, interventions, or even litigation scenarios.
Insurance & Cost Implications: Why Insurers Care
Now let’s connect the dots to insurance and cost escalation.
1. Higher claims from adverse events
When patient safety is compromised, patients suffer complications (infections, falls, medication injuries). These lead to more hospital days, more procedures, more liability claims. The more adverse events that occur, the more insurers must pay out.
2. Increased utilization and longer stays
Interruptions slow processes, delay diagnostics or therapy, and can lead to avoidable readmissions or extended hospital stays. That means more billable services, which means higher cost bases for insurance reimbursements.
3. Defensive practices and redundancy built in
To mitigate risks, institutions may embed extra checks, staffing overheads, duplicative monitoring systems, or insist on expensive “fail-safe” technologies. These redundancies are insurance buffers — but they cost money, and much of that burden is reflected in higher premiums or price structures.
4. Liability and malpractice exposure
Interruptions contribute to errors. If a patient is harmed, insurers might face malpractice claims. Resolving claims — legal costs, settlements, indemnities — is expensive and feeds into premium calculations.
5. Turnover and training costs
Frequent interruptions and the pressure they generate contribute to burnout and turnover. Replacing clinical staff is expensive (recruiting, training, orientation). Hospitals may inflate staffing budgets or require more buffer staff as “insurance,” raising costs across the board — which insurers end up absorbing through higher reimbursement rates.
Case in Point: Research Evidence
- Grissinger et al. (Sidetracks) document many types and sources of interruptions in health care settings, spotlighting how frequent and varied they are, including from ppl, alarms, and systems. (PubMed Central)
- Other literature (e.g. Monteiro et al.) frames interruptions as inherently harmful to patient safety and ties them to increased error likelihood. (PubMed Central)
- Risk management perspectives (e.g., “Workplace Interruptions Place Patient Safety at Risk”) note clinicians may be interrupted more than 10 times an hour by non-urgent issues — a constant drain on attention. (ISMIE)
Together, they build a compelling case: interruptions are not just nuisances but systemic risk amplifiers.
What To Do: Mitigation Strategies (Because hope is sexy too)
If you’re acting boldly (as you tend to), here are strategic levers to reduce the interruption tax:
- “No-interruption zones” or protected blocks — e.g. during med prep or charting, staff are shielded from non-urgent queries
- Smart alert triage — calibrate EHR alerts so only high priority ones break through
- Handoff protocols & checklists — structured transitions reduce need for ad-hoc questions
- Team role clarity & buffer personnel — designate “floater” staff to absorb interruptions
- Training & awareness culture — make staff conscious of how their “quick question” could ripple negatively
- Technology optimization — e.g. asynchronous messaging with AI SidekiQ, smarter paging, batching non-urgent tasks
If you reduce interruptions, you reduce errors, length of stays, litigation exposure, staff burnout — and insurers win because there’s less cost leakage.
If you like, I can spin this into a whitepaper with charts, targeted to executive audiences (health systems, insurers, funders). Want me to do that next?