What this Video Teaches us - A Summary:

The True Cost of Workplace Violence in Healthcare — And How to Build the Business Case to Fix It

Workplace violence costs U.S. hospitals an estimated $18.27 billion every year* — yet most healthcare leaders can't point to a single number for what it's costing their own organization. The data exists. It's just scattered across workers' comp claims, HR turnover reports, OSHA 300 logs, and risk management files that rarely talk to each other.

In this on-demand webinar, Vistelar COO Casey Goldschmidt breaks down how healthcare operational leaders — security directors, safety officers, CNOs, and CHROs — can pull that fragmented data into one defensible baseline cost, benchmark it against peer hospitals, and use it to build a business case their C-suite can act on. Below is a summary of what's covered, with timestamps from the full recording above.

Why the Cost of Workplace Violence Is So Hard to See

Clinical staff are five times more likely to be assaulted at work than the average U.S. employee — but the downstream costs of that exposure rarely land on one desk. Injury and lost productivity costs sit with risk management and HR. Turnover costs sit with HR and nursing administration. Post-incident response costs span finance, quality, and legal. Regulatory exposure sits with legal and compliance. Security holds its own incident data on top of all of it.
That fragmentation is exactly why workplace violence is so hard to bring forward as a capital priority — not because the cost isn't real, but because no one owns the full picture.

How Much Does Workplace Violence Actually Cost Hospitals?

Nationally, workplace violence costs U.S. hospitals $18.27 billion annually* — an average of roughly $3 million per hospital across the more than 6,100 hospitals in the U.S. Of that:

• $2.1 billion is tied to workers' compensation costs alone — about $340,000 per hospital**

• The average workers' comp claim costs approximately $28,000**

• Claims specifically tied to workplace violence can run $300,000–$400,000, depending on severity and acuity**

• These are aggregate, national averages — a starting point for understanding scale, not a substitute for your own facility's numbers.

• What Workplace Violence Prevention Programs Actually Deliver

• The return on investment isn't theoretical. Published research shows:

• Workplace violence prevention programs can reduce incident rates by 18% to 66%***

• One major pediatric health system sustained a 37% reduction in DART rate and a 48% reduction in incidents on target units after program investment***

• A 35% reduction in workers' comp claims over three years has been shown to produce a 4:1 return on investment**

How to Calculate Your Own Baseline Cost

Your OSHA 300 log is the starting point for building your baseline — it already contains injury and illness type, days away from work, body part, nature of injury, department, and job title data. From there, the key inputs to aggregate are:

• Workplace violence-related DART cases annually (days away, restricted, or transferred)

• Workers' comp claims and medical expenses tied to workplace violence

• Turnover attributed to workplace violence, and the cost to replace clinical vs. non-clinical staff

• Total reportable workplace violence incidents

Vistelar's Workplace Violence Impact & ROI Calculator walks through each of these inputs and benchmarks the result against peer hospitals by bed size, region, and national data — and because it runs locally in the browser, none of the data entered is stored or visible to Vistelar.

What Each of Your Executive Stakeholders Needs to See

A workplace violence business case doesn't land the same way with every executive — each stakeholder is listening for a different signal:

• COO — DART rate, days away from work, restricted days, agency spend, scheduling costs

• CFO — Current cost baseline (workers' comp, premiums, claims), proposed fix, projected ROI over 2–5 years

• CEO — Accreditation status, staff sentiment, outside optics, and how the case affects every other executive's priorities

• Chief Risk Officer — Legal/regulatory exposure, OSHA citations, litigation history, insurance premium impact

• CNO — Staffing levels, quality of care, and the downstream effect of turnover and burnout on patient care

• CHRO — Recruiting difficulty, workers' comp entry trends, and exit interview data

Your 30-Day Action Plan

• Week 1: Pull workers' comp claims, DART data, and agency/overtime spend from finance. Identify who owns your OSHA 300 log.

• Weeks 1–2: Aggregate the data into a single document. Apply BLS and NSI benchmarks for your facility type and calculate your gap to peer benchmark.

• By day 30: Build a stakeholder-specific one-pager for each C-suite member, model a five-year cost scenario (conservative and expected), and present preliminary findings to whichever executive you're closest with.
  
  

Data Report Sources:

*AHA Univ. of Washington Harborview 2025

**BLS SOII 2022/OSHA

***PMC scoping review, 2023