Healthattica™The Knowledge Cost Index
Missing context has a price. The Knowledge Cost Index measures one part of it — the time people lose to knowledge they can't find, trust or reuse.
The headline figures
- Conservative floor
- >$55B
- per year, publicly defensible
- Base case
- ~$90B
- per year
- Full range
- $55–140B
- low to high scenario
We estimate, conservatively, that unmanaged medical knowledge costs healthcare more than $55 billion a year across the United States, the EU, Japan, China, and India — only the time skilled people lose finding, verifying, and reconciling knowledge, not the larger cost of decisions made on knowledge that turns out to be wrong.
Where the cost sits
~$90B is a conservative base, and >$55B is a floor we are confident stating publicly. The parts of the model most open to challenge are precisely the ones we set conservatively.
What is inside the full whitepaper
- The formula and every input, with its source
- Full workforce, cost, and time-lost tables across all five markets
- Sector and market breakdowns, plus the conservative-to-high scenario range
- What is officially sourced vs. estimated, and why
- Every citation, linked
Get your own number
The figures above are industry-wide. A Context Assessment runs the same method over one of your domains and reports an organisation-specific range across the four drivers: time lost to search and retrieval, decisions made on outdated knowledge, duplicated effort, and compliance exposure.
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