The Hidden Costs of Ineffective Patient Education Content 

Poor patient education content is expensive and you might not know how expensive until you make it good or great. 

On key financial reports, there isn’t a line item called “unintended poor patient education expenses,” but the impact is everywhere. You should be able to see it in long consults, burnt out doctors and their staff, anxious nurses, and confused patients and caregivers. 

These are felt CONSTANTLY. They just don’t get captured as “education issues”.  

Let’s get into it… 

The Workload that They’ve Only JUST Started Talking About on Instagram 

Spend an hour in any clinic and you’ll see it: nurses and nurse practitioners quietly absorbing the fallout of unclear or last-minute instructions. One patient arrives confused. Another didn’t watch the video. Someone brings a Google printout instead of the actual guidance they were sent. Someone else didn’t know they needed to fast. 

You get our drift. 

And clinicians aren’t quiet about this anymore. A lot of doctor and nurse influencers – people like Nurse Hadley, Dr. Karan Rajan, and Nurse Johnn – talk openly about how much time is spent re-explaining the basics, correcting misunderstandings, and walking patients through instructions step-by-step. 

They might not say it outright as “poor patient education content”, yet their stories reveal how much hidden work comes from gaps in patient understanding. 

Inside clinics, it looks like this: 

  • Re-teaching information covered once or twice already 
  • Spending 30, 40, sometimes 90 minutes walking patients/caregivers through the basics 
  • Trying to calm fear as best as you can  
  • Asking basic questions that put the patient on the spot and in a vulnerable position 

While it’s not documented as extra work, it is. And it ties back into the part that clinicians will now admit to openly: burnout.  

It’s a slow burnout; an erosion that happens when the same script is repeated hour after hour, day after day.  

This type of physician burnout isn’t the one that’s headline-grabbing, and doesn’t always come from emotionally heavy days. It comes from:  

  • constantly playing catch-up 
  • never having enough time to get ahead 
  • watching your schedule fall apart because someone misunderstood prep 
  • feeling like you’re doing the same job three times 
  • absorbing everyone else’s anxiety, confusion, and fear 
  • being the “fixer” every single time something slips through the cracks 

These are preventable problems and it is no longer sustainable.  

Operational drag has a price tag, too…

A closer look at the ripple effects of just one confusing piece of patient education content would reveal how much it actually costs a clinic. 

A small misunderstanding becomes a scheduling delay —> A scheduling delay becomes room-time inefficiency —> Room-time inefficiency becomes overtime —> Overtime becomes budget pressure —> Budget pressure becomes staffing issues. 

The financial impact is real. It’s just diffused across several buckets: throughput, overtime, call volume, rescheduling, patient experience scores. Nothing explicitly labeled “education problem,” yet driven by it. 

When patient understanding slips, HCHAPS feel the brunt of it (and so does the bottom line). 

Poor patient education content doesn’t stop at workflow strain or burnout. Eventually, it shows up in the one place hospitals do measure: patient experience scores – especially HCAHPS. 

And while HCAHPS doesn’t have a question labeled, “How good were the materials you got?”, many domains are directly influenced by how well patients understand their care: 

  • Communication With Nurses
    “Did nurses explain things in a way you could understand?” 
  • Communication With Doctors
    “Did doctors explain things clearly?” 
  • Communication About Medications
    (Patients rarely score this well if they didn’t understand instructions the first time.) 
  • Discharge Information
    “Did you understand what symptoms to watch for?”
    “Did you understand the purpose of each medication?” 
  • Care Transitions
    If a patient leaves confused or overwhelmed, the scores on this domain plummets. 

These are all comprehension dependent. 

We’ve seen major U.S. health systems acknowledge this connection openly: 

Hospitals don’t say this out directly… “our education content wasn’t strong enough, and it hurt our HCAHPS.” …but the connection is there.  

And the consequences? They’re very real. 

  • Declines in communication and discharge-related HCAHPS scores often contribute to lower CMS star ratings because these domains carry significant weight in the scoring model. A drop from four stars to three has real consequences for a hospital, influencing reputation, referral patterns, community trust, and even payer negotiations. These effects may not be attributed to “poor education content” in official reporting, but the connection between patient understanding and experience scores is well recognized across the industry. 

So even though there’s no neat spreadsheet labeled “Cost of Poor Patient Education Materials”, the domino effect is very real: 

Poor comprehension → lower HCAHPS → VBP penalties, lost incentives, weaker star ratings. 

So, where do we go from here?

Many of the issues we’ve highlighted in this article improve when patients receive information that is clear, consistent, prescriptive, and timely. Hospitals that prioritize patient comprehension tend to see better prepared patients, and a staff that feels more supported. When all these things happen, HCAHPS and CMS performance scores begin to rise. Higher performance in these areas strengthens a hospital’s overall rating and helps protect the Medicare reimbursement that depends on patient experience results. 

If your hospital or department is looking to standardize patient education and support stronger comprehension across the care journey, 5thPort can help. Reach out anytime to learn how we partner with clinical teams to improve education, streamline workflows, and create more informed patients by filling in the form on this page.