A Mobile App for the Precise Measurement of Healthcare Provider Activity Times to Support Time-Driven Activity Based Costing Studies.

ABSTRACT

The duration of activities performed by healthcare providers are pivotal to Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) models. This study examines the use of a smartphone mobile application technology to record activity times. This study validates the accuracy of activity times recorded on a smartphone mobile application, dTool, compared to observed length of time recordings in the operating room. For analysis, we performed two one-sided tests for the measurements "Case Start" and "Case End". Equivalence bounds were specified in terms of raw mean difference of 1 min (upper) and -1 min (lower). The total number of comparisons in the observer protocol was 72 (32 "case start" patient comparisons and 40 "case end" patient comparisons measured over 45 individual OR cases). Given equivalence bounds of -1.000 and 1.000 (on a raw scale) and an alpha of 0.05, both equivalence tests were significant provider and third-party observer protocol presented t(40) = 3.228 and p = < 0.001; observer timing protocol presented t(68.68) = 56.762, p = < 0.001. Conclusions: With this novel smartphone technology, a healthcare provider can reliably self-record activity LoT using dTool while providing patient care. Future TDABC studies incorporating this technology will reduce the potential operational barriers to implementation.