Manual Vital Signs continue to be a legacy ineffiency
Manual vital sign collection was designed for a healthcare environment with different staffing ratios, lower acuity, and fewer financial pressures. Today, it has become one of the most labor-intensive and least adaptive components of clinical care. In many inpatient settings, nurses spend way too much time each shift collecting and documenting vital signs.
This burden is not theoretical. Nurses in the MarketWise study described manual vitals as one of the most disruptive components of their workflow. While vital signs are clinically essential, the act of collecting them manually diverts attention away from patient assessment, early symptom recognition, care coordination, and education. Intermittent measurement also means that meaningful changes can occur between checks, delaying intervention until deterioration becomes more severe.
The downstream consequences are significant. Delayed recognition of decline increases the likelihood of rapid response activations, ICU transfers, and extended length of stay. Each escalation event consumes additional nursing time and often requires higher-cost staffing resources. For healthcare systems already operating near staffed bed capacity, these events amplify instability across units.
After discharge, the monitoring gap becomes even more pronounced. Patients transition from frequent inpatient observation to limited or no monitoring during the period when readmission risk is highest. Without continuous data, healthcare systems rely on scheduled calls, follow-up visits, or patient-initiated escalation, all of which are unreliable proxies for physiological change.
Finance leaders recognize this dynamic clearly. In the MarketWise financial study, respondents consistently described labor strain, readmissions, and safety events as interconnected rather than isolated issues. When nursing time is constrained, visibility declines. When visibility declines, adverse events increase. When adverse events increase, staffing demand and cost rise further.
Manual monitoring is no longer just inefficient; it's structurally misaligned with the realities healthcare systems face today.
