Where the saving is: the four cost levers in hospitals and clinics

Updated 16 August 2026.

"Where is the saving?" is the right question, and it deserves an answer that is not an invented number. The honest answer is that the saving is not a property of the technology — it is a property of your service. There are four places it can be. If none of them applies to your house, it is not there, and it is better to know that before buying.

This page is part of the ROI guide and covers the hospital and clinic side. For a care home the arithmetic is different, and it is in what it returns in a care home.

Lever 1 — Procedures that today require sedation

This is the lever with the highest unit cost: a sedated procedure consumes drugs, anaesthesia time, recovery monitoring and often an escort who loses a day.

The literature studying this works mostly in paediatric imaging and short procedures with distraction. The condition for a saving is simple: those people would genuinely have been sedated. If your service already does most scans without sedation, the avoided cost does not exist — not because distraction fails, but because there was no expense to avoid.

Lever 2 — Procedure time and interruptions

A calm patient cooperates, moves less, forces fewer repeats. Where this counts is in rooms whose cost per minute is high and whose schedule is the constraint — imaging, dentistry, wound care.

The question to ask is: how many minutes per session, how many sessions a day, and what does a minute of that room cost? Without those three figures, any estimate is talk.

Lever 3 — Missed appointments, cancellations and walk-outs

This is the most underestimated one. An appointment that does not happen because the person did not turn up — or panicked at the door — costs the whole slot. In MRI and in dentistry, fear is a recognised cause of non-attendance.

Here the sum is easy to do with data you already hold: non-attendance rate, cost of the slot, and the share of that rate attributable to anxiety or claustrophobia.

Lever 4 — Adherence in long programmes

In rehabilitation the problem is rarely the first session: it is the tenth. A programme abandoned halfway consumes resources without producing the outcome that justified the spend. What the rehabilitation literature most often reports is adherence and engagement — more sessions completed, not necessarily a better clinical result.

The fifth, which is not a saving

Patient experience, differentiation, family satisfaction, appeal to staff. It is real value and it often decides the purchase — but it is not an avoided-cost line, and presenting it as one in a tender weakens the rest of the argument.

A model that holds up

For each lever that applies to your service:

unit cost avoided × real frequency × probability of avoiding it

The third term is the one almost everyone forgets, and it is what separates a defensible estimate from a brochure. If you cannot estimate the probability, measure it: that is exactly what a pilot is for.

Before using any of these numbers

Figures published in other countries and other systems do not transfer — the population, the comparator and who pays for what all change. It is explained in the ROI nobody can prove, and it is the recommended read before writing any saving into a document someone will assess. How to measure what is yours is in how to run a pilot.

RVer is a virtual reality system for clinical use designed for healthcare settings, whose base product is registered as a Class I Medical Device with Infarmed (CDM 94571546) and bears the CE mark under MDR 2017/745. The RVer Motion, RVer Neuro and RVer Exposure modules are in development and are not covered by that registration.