Walk past any major hospital in America, and you’ll likely see cranes, construction equipment, and multimillion-dollar expansions, signaling that the solution to the hospital capacity crisis has been settled: build more beds and hire more staff. However, this approach only treats the symptom, not the underlying cause, and it does so at an extraordinary cost.
The real solution to hospital capacity isn’t in blueprints and new construction; it’s by further focusing on what clinicians are trained to do in the first place: preventing complications, avoiding unnecessary admissions, and streamlining the care journey to get and keep patients well. We need to harness clinician expertise, supported by new tools, to prevent avoidable admissions and reduce hospital-acquired conditions, thus keeping more beds open for the patients who truly need them.
The hidden drivers of overcrowding
Many hospital bed days are tied to avoidable outcomes such as readmissions, inpatient complications, underuse of outpatient surgery, and preventable admissions through the emergency department. Every unnecessary readmission, every preventable complication, and every inpatient surgery that could have been safely performed in an outpatient setting consumes valuable hospital capacity.
Instead of solely focusing on how many beds we need to build, we should ask how many we can free up through smarter, safer care and improved clinical quality and performance workflows.
Clinicians and quality improvement: the blueprint for change
The solutions are well within reach. They exist within the skill sets of physicians, clinicians, and quality improvement teams already working in our facilities. By leveraging this existing expertise with the capacity issue in mind and supporting it with emerging advanced technologies, health systems can make meaningful headway on metrics that translate directly into access.
- Reducing readmissions through stronger discharge planning and follow-up.
- Preventing complications by consistently applying quality improvement methodologies and evidence-based best practices.
- Shifting appropriate procedures to outpatient settings, where patients often recover better and faster.
- Coordinating with post-acute care providers to ensure patients leave the hospital with the right supports in place.
Every one of these actions creates capacity, not by adding bricks and mortar, but by improving outcomes and shortening unnecessary stays.
The potential of technology and data
One factor that holds a lot of promise is the quickly evolving toolkit available to clinicians. Technology is making it easier than ever to identify patterns of potentially preventable quality defects and their root causes. And it is not here to replace clinicians but rather to enable their best work. By pairing advanced analytic technology with frontline expertise, hospitals can turn quality improvement into an effective strategy for addressing capacity challenges.
From crisis to opportunity by rethinking growth
Many regional and hospital leaders are urgently appealing for new construction to solve capacity issues. However, the impact of effectively addressing these issues through preventive quality efforts could be seismic, shifting the narrative on access to acute care. And reducing avoidable outcomes to benchmark levels would free hundreds, if not thousands, of new beds, without pouring a single ounce of concrete.
That’s the power of focusing on outcomes and patterns. By improving safety and reducing quality defects, hospitals can relieve pressure on emergency departments, reduce costly delays, and make the patient experience smoother and safer. And unlike new buildings, which can take years to plan and complete, these changes can start to make an impact much sooner.
Hospital leaders have an opportunity to redefine what it means to build and grow. The true foundation of capacity isn’t only laid with steel and glass; it’s also built through investment in platforms and processes, and benchmarks that prevent those beds from being needed in the first place.
A positive path forward
We don’t need to wait for the next expansion project to grow hospital capacity. The tools and expertise are already here, inside our hospitals, and technology is making it possible to act faster and smarter than ever before. That’s how we turn quality into capacity. That’s how we’ll build a better future of healthcare that is not just bigger, but better.
Source: SDI Productions, Getty Images
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