Lone Worker Safety ROI: How to Build the Business Case in USD

Building the business case for lone worker safety means translating duty-of-care into dollars. Here’s how US EHS and HR leaders structure the numbers.

The four value levers

1. Avoided regulatory penalties. OSHA serious violations carry up to $16,131 each; willful or repeated up to $161,327. California SB 553 penalties compound per worksite. Documented controls reduce the likelihood and severity of citations.

2. Reduced workers’ compensation and civil exposure. A single severe assault on a visiting nurse can cost roughly $120,000 in workers’ comp plus civil exposure. Faster duress response and a defensible audit trail reduce both frequency and severity.

3. Lower total cost of ownership. A smartphone SaaS at $53.43 per user, per year, eliminates hardware procurement, replacement, docks, and much of the manual call-centre overhead.

4. Operational byproducts. Automated check-ins and a centralized incident log save administrative time and produce inspection-ready records as a byproduct of use.

A worked example

A home health agency with 100 visiting nurses:

• Annual Sentry cost: 100 × $53.43 = $5,343.
• Hardware pendant alternative: typically $15–20 per user per month — $18,000–24,000 per year, before monitoring overhead.
• One avoided lost-time injury: ~$120,000 in direct costs.

Mitigating a single severe incident pays for years of cover.

How to model it

Use our Lone Worker ROI & TCO Calculator to plug in your workforce size, current hardware and manual-monitoring spend, and incident rate. The tool applies a 25% incident-reduction assumption and returns a three-year savings figure.

Takeaways

• Frame ROI across penalties, workers’ comp, TCO, and admin time.
• A smartphone SaaS is almost always cheaper than hardware at scale.
• Avoiding one serious incident pays for years of platform cost.

Book a demo to get a tailored ROI model for your operation.