A More Efficient Use of Hospital Beds?

Use of hospital beds: a cohort study of admissions to a provincial teaching hospital.

An instrument was developed to study the use of hospital beds and discharge arrangements of a cohort of 847 admissions to the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, for a three week period during February-March 1986. For only 38% of bed days were patients considered to have medical, nursing, or life support reasons for requiring a provincial teaching hospital bed. The requirements for a bed in the ho...

A More Efficient Use of Delta-CRLs

Delta-certificate revocation lists (delta-CRLs) were designed to provide a more efficient way to distribute certificate status information. However, as this paper shows, in some environments the benefits of using delta-CRLs will be minimal if delta-CRLs are used as was originally intended. This paper provides an analysis of delta-CRLs that demonstrates the problems associated with issuing delta...

How many hospital beds?

For many years, average bed occupancy level has been the primary measure that has guided hospital bed capacity decisions at both policy and managerial levels. Even now, the common wisdom that there is an excess of beds nationally has been based on a federal target of 85% occupancy that was developed about 25 years ago. This paper examines data from New York state and uses queueing analysis to e...

Reducing Hospital Beds

Do More Hospital Beds Lead to Higher Hospitalization Rates? A Spatial Examination of Roemer’s Law

BACKGROUND Roemer's Law, a widely cited principle in health care policy, states that hospital beds that are built tend to be used. This simple but powerful expression has been invoked to justify Certificate of Need regulation of hospital beds in an effort to contain health care costs. Despite its influence, a surprisingly small body of empirical evidence supports its content. Furthermore, known...