Minutes Cost Money: Calculating Secapp’s Return on Investment in the Healthcare and Rescue Services Segment

The Finnish Emergency Powers Act requires that critical services can scale staffing in minutes during emergencies. If these capabilities do not exist, both safety and finances suffer significantly. In practice, many public organizations have found this challenging as alerts, for example in healthcare, are still often handled via manual calls and text messages, which is slow, labor-intensive, and expensive.

Secapp is designed to solve this by improving critical communications and staff alerting. In practice, we offer a tool that enables our customers to operationalize their preparedness plan, improving organizational responsiveness and resilience.

This analysis compiles return on investment (ROI) calculations for Secapp in three organization sizes: small (200 employees), medium (1,200 employees), and large (6,500 employees). The calculations are based on the most recent estimates and public research sources for each benefit category.

Although a large share of Secapp’s value comes specifically from critical communications, Secapp can generate substantial cost savings in other areas as well. The following chapters break down the main benefit categories: 

• automation of shift-fill alerts
• shortening of disruptions and exceptional situations such as IT outages, and at the high end, improved major-incident alerting 
• digitization of forms and checklists
• lone-worker safety features; reduced sickness absence; and secure communications. 

For each category, annual savings estimates and the underlying assumptions are provided. Finally, ROI percentages and payback times are summarized on an annual basis. All estimates are supported with sources (e.g., Gartner, THL, Statistics Finland, IBM, Valvira), and are intentionally conservative. Actual benefits can often be significantly higher.

Daily shift-fill alerts create significant hidden costs when handled manually. Various estimates suggest that healthcare units have on average 0.05–0.1 shift-fill call-outs per person per day. For a 200-person organization, this means about 10–20 alerts per day, typically managed by supervisors via calls and/or SMS messages.

In one day in a 200-person unit, it is easy to spend up to 100 minutes on calls and send 40 text messages. With a conservative estimate, this equals approximately €102 of extra daily cost purely for shift-fill alerting (1.67 h × €60/h + 40 × €0.10 = €102). Annually, this is close to €37,000 in cost in a small unit, just in labor time and messaging. At the same time, the process is slow: filling one shift can take hours, weakening operational reliability and negatively affecting job satisfaction.

With Secapp, shift filling can be automated and the time needed reduced to seconds. Ready-made alert templates and multi-channel notification (app, SMS, calls, email, Tetra) reach large groups at once, and recipients can confirm shift acceptance with one tap. In practice, up to 90% of the manual calling work is “waste” removed through automation. Secapp mass alerting is delivered in 30–60 seconds and provides real-time acknowledgements.

Case example: In the Prison and Probation Service of Finland, Secapp reduced the time required to fill shifts from a full working day to under one hour, and often a substitute is found in minutes. This speed ensures continuity even during sudden absences.

Through automation, supervisors’ time is freed for productive work and phone and SMS costs are reduced. Table 1 shows estimated annual savings from improved shift-fill alerting for different organization sizes. The calculations compare the manual process cost (labor + messages) with the automated process cost (Secapp license + minimal messaging costs).

Current practical experience suggests that 0.1 alerts/person/day is realistic in many units. However, even with lower alert frequencies (0.05 or 0.03), savings remain significant, though smaller.

Table 1: Annual cost of shift-fill alerting manually vs. with Secapp 

(impact of alert frequency across scenarios)

As Table 1 shows, at the current typical frequency (0.1/person/day), savings are significant, e.g., about €24,000 per year for a 200-person unit. With lower alert volumes, benefits decrease, but Secapp still covers at least its own cost. At only 0.03 alerts, the manual cost is ~€11,200 vs. Secapp ~€9,700, yielding ~€500 savings. In practice, even slightly above 0.03 alerts, Secapp is justified purely on shift-fill savings. In larger units the corresponding break-even point is about 0.025–0.03 alerts/person/day.

The conclusion is that shift-fill alert automation yields clear savings in most organizations, especially where sudden staffing gaps occur weekly or more often. A qualitative benefit is improved operational reliability: substitutes are found faster, improving continuity of service.

Major incident alerts are rare, typically happening perhaps once per year, but preparedness is both legally required and critically important. With traditional methods, alerting a large staff pool is very slow.

Example: on a winter evening, a 15-car crash brings up to 25 injured patients, requiring about 150 employees (1/6 of hospital staff) to be called in urgently. Manually, 150 calls (5 min each) and 400 SMS messages would consume 750 minutes of labor and cost roughly €790 for a single alert. If the alert is delayed by 15 minutes, additional cost already accumulates at €100/min (this can include on-call compensation, patient transfers, lost charges, and postponed critical surgeries), not to mention patient safety risk.

With Secapp, a mass alert is sent in seconds to all required employees at once, and it is delivered even if the phone is in silent mode. Recipients acknowledge availability in real time, giving managers immediate situational awareness: who is coming and whether skills coverage is sufficient. Even one successful major incident alert via Secapp saves significant time and money compared to a manual approach.

Table 2: Cost of one major-incident alert (MI) manually vs. with Secapp

Assumptions: Manual alerting 5 min/person + 2 SMS/person (as above). With Secapp, labor cost ~10% of the manual level (alert preparation and supervision) and SMS costs ~10% (most notifications are delivered via the app).

Every minute of downtime costs money and reputation. Gartner has estimated that for an average organization, the cost of IT system downtime is about $5,600 (≈€5,100) per minute, including lost productivity, customer impact, and remediation costs. In healthcare the cost per minute can be even higher.

A common root cause of delay is that the correct response team is not reached quickly enough. Traditionally, the information flow may run through a chain: the user reports to a service desk, which tries to reach on-call IT experts via multiple channels. Secapp accelerates this dramatically: an alert can be triggered automatically when a monitoring system notices a fault, or by one button tap, reaching all on-call responders instantly. Acknowledgements reveal who is reacting, and escalation can be automated as needed.

If just one major outage per year is shortened by 15 minutes due to faster reaction, the monetary benefit is 15 × €5,100 = €76,500. This magnitude is supported by Gartner and other estimates. Such a saving can pay for even the smallest considered unit’s Secapp license for several years. In large organizations, multiple IT incidents per year are likely, making the potential benefit even higher. IBM has also reported that roughly 70% of time in IT problem situations is spent on reaching the right people rather than the actual fix, so speeding up communications reduces downtime in a very concrete fashion.

(Note: In the smallest 200-person units, there are fewer independent IT systems, so this benefit is primarily assumed for organizations ≥1,200 employees. Therefore, in the ROI summary, IT outage savings are weighted only for ≥1,200 staff sizes.)

Employee time is valuable, and a significant portion of administrative work consists of filling forms, writing reports, and recording checklists. Estimates suggest that in health and rescue services, 20–40% of staff regularly perform reporting and documentation tasks as part of their work. Studies indicate that nursing staff internationally spend on average 17–40% of their work time on documentation. From an organizational point of view, this constitutes indirect work, taking up time that could be used on direct patient-facing work.

Secapp provides tools to complete forms, checklists, and reports digitally on mobile devices. This removes paper handling, speeds up data aggregation, and reduces errors (e.g., missing or illegible entries). Digital forms can be configured to validate completeness and route data automatically to the right parties in real time. Tracking data is also logged automatically, eliminating separate after-the-fact reporting.

We’ll conservatively assume that 20% of staff use Secapp for daily reporting and each saves on average 5 minutes per day compared to manual recording. Then savings are 5 min × 0.2 × headcount × 220 workdays/year. For a 1,200-person organization, this equals about 4,400 hours/year freed. Converted to money at an average total labor cost of ~€60/hour, this is about €264,000 of work capacity per year. For a 200-person organization the corresponding savings is about €44,000, and for 6,500 employees as much as €1.43 million per year. These numbers primarily describe improvements in efficiency: staff are able to use more time on core tasks when not unduly burdened by bureaucracy requirements.

The 5 min/person/day assumption is conservative; in many cases, digital tools have reduced documentation time significantly more. This calculation also excludes potential additional savings from replacing other systems with Secapp.

Qualitatively, digitization improves data accuracy and availability: information is not lost on paper slips, and leadership receives real-time summary reports for decision-making. This simplifies management and makes certain that all the checks required by patient safety are performed as and when needed. This also reduces duplicate work and frees up resources for other activities.

In many sectors, part of staff work alone at times, e.g., home care, security duties, ER desks, or night shifts at a fire station. An estimated 20–40% of public sector employees may regularly have lone-working shifts or tasks. Lone working includes increased risks: in accidents or violence situations, assistance may be delayed if nobody notices immediately. Occupational safety regulations typically require employers to ensure lone worker safety, which can be achieved using technical measures, for example.

Secapp provides a One-Click emergency button and a lone-worker alarm (“dead man’s switch”) in the mobile app without separate devices. With one press, the worker can send an alert immediately to predefined colleagues or supervisors, including location if needed. The lone-worker alarm can also detect lack of movement and send an automatic alert unless the user confirms they are OK. These features can improve emergency reaction time by several minutes compared to situations where a worker is starting to be searched for only after they fail to answer calls.

Example: In one case, a lone-worker alarm reduced time to assistance from 45 minutes to under 5 minutes. Generally, at least ~5 minutes of reaction-time improvement is achievable in critical situations with Secapp’s safety features.

The primary benefit is humane: preventing fatalities and reducing injury severity through faster assistance. Economically, this can reduce the cost of severe workplace accidents: faster first aid reduces length of sickness absence and rehabilitation costs. Exact amounts are difficult to quantify, but as an example, if faster reaction prevents one employee from taking a one-month sickness leave annually, direct salary and substitute costs can easily be tens of thousands of euros.

In summary, Secapp’s lone-worker features improve safety and wellbeing. Their financial impact appears through reduced accident-related costs, potentially lower insurance fees, and reduced operational disruption. This also lowers the risk of very large compensation claims in the worst cases.

Employee wellbeing and communication tools have a surprisingly strong relationship: good information flow and clear operating models can reduce workload and stress, and over time reduce sickness absence. In the public sector, employees have traditionally averaged about 13–16 sick days per year (varying by sector, often higher in health and social care). The Confederation of Finnish Industries has estimated that one sickness absence day costs on average €370 (including salary and indirect losses).

If Secapp adoption and related process improvements reduce sickness absence by just 1%, the impact is significant. A 1% reduction means total sick days shrink accordingly: in a 6,500-person organization, 1% fewer absences means roughly 800–900 saved workdays annually and about €300,000 savings. In a 1,200-person unit this would be about €60,000, and in a 200-person unit about €10,000 per year.

Even this small reduction can be achieved without radical changes. For example, with Secapp:

• Staffing gaps can be filled faster, reducing overtime burden and burnout risk.
• A stronger sense of safety (lone-worker safety, reliable communications) can improve wellbeing.
• Digital tools reduce frustration with bureaucracy and save time.

These factors improve resilience and reduce absence risk. Because even one avoided absence day is worth hundreds of euros, a small percentage change scales into tens of thousands of euros at larger headcounts. Therefore, 1% is a conservative and realistic assumption.

(Note that if your organization has a very low sickness absence ratio, 1% improvement may only mean a few days. However, there is evidence from the Finnish public sector that improving employee wellbeing has reduced sick days by much more than the 1% used in this calculation.)  

In critical sectors, information security and data protection are especially important. Yet, under day-to-day pressure, employees may rely on unofficial tools such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger for work communication, especially in urgent situations. Estimates suggest that up to ~50% of staff may use non-approved messaging apps in some organizations, exposing information security risks. Many municipalities and wellbeing services counties have prohibited or strongly restricted WhatsApp in work phones, especially for patient or client data, because:

• Data privacy requirements: WhatsApp does not meet, for instance, the EU data protection requirements for handling personal data. Using it for sensitive communications can lead to serious consequences and fines. In GDPR cases, personal data also must not transfer outside the EU/EEA without safeguards, which cannot be guaranteed in WhatsApp. For example, Meta received a €225 million GDPR fine related to WhatsApp privacy practices.
• Data protection weaknesses: Using WhatsApp for work can lead to sharing protected information in groups in an uncontrolled way. Some organizations have prohibited WhatsApp on official devices due to these risks.

Secapp provides a secure communication channel designed for public sector needs. This materially reduces the risk of data breaches compared to shadow IT instant messaging systems. Secapp also supports single sign-on and access control, unlike consumer-grade apps.

Secure chat reduces the risk of costs related to data privacy sanctions or data breaches. This is difficult to quantify precisely, but the benefit becomes clear as follows: if an organization avoids even one major data breach that could involve, for example, a €100,000 fine plus reputation damage, Secapp’s cost pays back many times over.

In addition, in daily operations, staff can rely on an approved channel, enabling faster decision-making without resorting to unofficial tools. Overall, Secapp’s security benefits function like insurance: preventing rare but potentially catastrophic events.

Many organizations still maintain pagers for on-call and critical alerts. When Secapp is used for critical messaging and alerting, pager fleets can often be reduced or eliminated, creating direct cost savings from monthly paging service fees, device leasing or device cost, and repair, replacement, and support plans.

Cost basis (per pager)

Using public sources, a conservative per-device monthly cost can be approximated as:

• paging service fee: ~€ 8/ month per device, weighted average from a large hospital survey,
• a replacement/repair protection plan example: €1.3 / month per device,
• device cost converted into a “lease-equivalent” monthly figure: assuming a pager hardware price around €150-€200, amortized across 36 months.

This yields an estimated total of ~€14 per pager per month, or ~€168 per pager per year.

Estimated annual savings by organization size

If we assume number of pagers equals 10% of total staff (on-call and critical roles), savings scale linearly with pager count.

Scaling rule: Annual savings ≈ €168 × number of pagers.

Note: This does not include potential additional monthly infrastructure fees and internal labor (telecom operator time, IT support, antenna leases, integration), which some organizations report separately. As pagers are inherently one-way communication devices, this creates additional workflow inefficiencies:

• recipients must interrupt their work to call back
• no delivery confirmation or prioritization
• repeated “phone tag” delays between staff

Studies indicate that clinicians may spend 15–20 minutes per shift handling pager callbacks, which translates into substantial labor cost and lost productivity.

When these factors are included, the true total cost of pagers can be multiple times higher than the direct monthly cost alone.

The table below aggregates the annual savings by category and calculates overall ROI for Secapp in one year. The assumed Secapp license cost is €4/user/month in small and medium organizations and €3/user/month in large organizations (e.g. wellbeing services county level of size). Therefore, annual license costs are approximately €9,600 (200 employees), €57,600 (1,200 employees), and €234,000 (6,500 employees).

Table 3: Annual savings from Secapp and ROI by organization size (conservative estimate, including pager discontinuation)

As the table shows, Secapp’s deployment cost is paid back multiple times over at all sizes. The smallest 200-person unit yields an estimated ~€81k annual savings, roughly 7 times the license cost (≈+745% ROI). At the medium-size hospital level, savings are ~€0.5M per year (≈+730% ROI). In the largest category (wellbeing services county), benefits reach ~€2.8M per year, almost 11 times the license cost, with payback in about one month.

These calculations are intentionally conservative and do not assign euro values to prevented fatalities or major injury outcomes via lone-worker safety, nor to data security incidents avoided (which are rare but potentially very costly). These factors increase Secapp’s value further in qualitative terms. For example, a single avoided major incident or a major sanction event would shift the calculation by hundreds of thousands of euros.

Referring to the major incident section above, these situations also generate costs from staff call-out compensation, and rates vary by customer. With clear grouping of staff and a designed alerting protocol in Secapp, the organization can optimize which staff are alerted during disruptions and exceptional situations (including major incident alerts). This improves predictability and control of call-out compensation costs.

In addition, when considering customer-specific benefits, we highlight security-sector operations, linked to the lone-worker safety section above. Following the creation of wellbeing services counties in Finland, resulting in consolidation of municipal healthcare, first response, and fire and rescue services, many security-related service contracts transferred from previous providers. Their quantities and annual costs can vary widely. Several wellbeing services counties have benefited from expanding Secapp mobile personal safety and lone-worker safety in their organization, achieving significant euro savings (e.g., ~€200,000/year) by reducing overlapping service contracts. As an additional benefit, mobile safety users can also use daily communications functionality in everyday operations.

For rescue services, we also highlight alerting of regional contract fire brigades. Through automation, alerting delays can be prevented and shortened, and escalation automation ensures sufficient skilled personnel are alerted and participation status is visible, so that required staffing is mobilized according to protocol.

From a high-level perspective, broad Secapp usage in wellbeing services counties also creates synergy and efficiency in critical communications between cooperation areas, and on an even wider scale, nationally across health and rescue services.

We also highlight, regarding public procurement, our cooperation with various ICT integrators and procurement stakeholders. Secapp can currently be purchased via multiple framework agreements, enabling benefit realization through a lighter public procurement process and reduced procurement overhead. Our Head of Customer Success will gladly discuss procurement-related topics with you.

In summary, Secapp’s ROI is exceptionally strong. Even by reducing shift-fill alerting costs and accelerating IT incident reaction, the system pays for itself many times over. When also including operational efficiency gains in forms and reporting, reduced sickness absence, reduced pager costs, and risk reduction, the return is unusually high for a public-sector digital investment. This explains why solutions like Secapp are not merely a cost, but a strategic way to save euros while improving service quality and risk management.

In line with Secapp’s value propositions, Secapp is a multi-purpose platform for social and healthcare services and rescue services. Significant synergy benefits have already been achieved and remain achievable within cooperation areas and nationally in Finland. Similar outcomes are also possible internationally and there are already significant use cases in Estonia to prove this. 

Our goal is to be the go-to critical communications partner for healthcare and rescue services. We already cooperate with the majority of Finnish wellbeing services counties under a co-development partnership model. In this model, we jointly determine the optimal scope of Secapp usage and how the above benefits are operationalized in daily work.

Our starting point is to provide end users with the most usable system possible and to implement the whole with a sustainable cost structure, while ensuring a healthy business for the service provider. We are happy to provide consultative critical communications expertise to all our customers.

**Sources:**

1. Gartner (2014) via Atlassian: Average cost of IT downtime approx. $5,600 per minute (depending on industry, $2,300–$9,000 per minute).
   (https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/kpis/cost-of-downtime)
2. Ponemon Institute (2016): The cost of IT downtime has risen to nearly $9,000 per minute on average.
   (https://www.ponemon.org/local/upload/file/2016%20HPE%20CCC%20GLOBAL%20REPORT%20FINAL%203.pdf)
3. Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (2024): Average sick leave in the municipal sector is 16.4 days per year.
   (In Finnish)(https://www.ttl.fi/ajankohtaista/tiedote/kunta-alalla-sairauspoissaoloja-vahemman-kuin-kertaakaan-2000-luvulla)
4. Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) (2023): €370 = estimated cost of one sick leave day for an employer in Finland.
5. BMC Nursing Journal (2022): Nurses spend 17–40% of their working time on documentation (Canada 26%, UK 17%, USA 25–41%, Netherlands 40%).
   (https://bmcnurs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12912-022-00811-7)
6. Onerva Hoiva (2023): “14 reasons why you should not use WhatsApp for social and healthcare communication” – WhatsApp does not meet GDPR requirements, may lead to fines; lacks audit logs, information can spread uncontrollably.
   (In Finnish)(https://onervahoiva.fi/14-syyta-miksi-sinun-ei-tulisi-kayttaa-whatsappia-asiakastiedoista-viestiessa-sote-alalla/)
7. Yle News (2020): “WhatsApp is a catastrophe for organizations”; municipalities have banned WhatsApp in e.g. social and healthcare work due to data protection concerns; sensitive data may spread in groups in violation of GDPR.
   (In Finnish) (https://yle.fi/a/3-11545657)
8. MyLoneWorkers (2023): Lone worker alarm systems significantly reduce response times; examples show reduction from 45 minutes to under 5 minutes, clearly reducing damage.
9. Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL) & Occupational Safety and Health Administration: Occupational Safety and Health Act, Section 29; employer must ensure assistance for lone workers; minors must not work alone in hazardous jobs.
10. EU GDPR Article 83: Maximum administrative fine for violations is €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover (whichever is higher). Authorities have enforced this, e.g. WhatsApp (Facebook) received a €225 million fine.