Monday, January 26, 2015

Hospitals full of empty beds

Crain's Chicago Business reports:
On its busiest day in 2013, 60 percent of the patient beds at Roseland Community Hospital on Chicago's Far South Side sat empty.

It was the worst performance of the 95 hospitals in the Chicago area, but Roseland's plight is hardly unique. Dr. John Warner Hospital, in a small town south of Bloomington, has an average daily census of 1.5 patients and an occupancy rate of 12 percent, the lowest in Illinois. Statewide, 76 hospitals routinely fill less than 50 percent of their beds.

Buffeted by population shifts and changes in health insurance, the hospital industry in Illinois has far more capacity than it needs. More than 12,000 of the roughly 33,000 beds staffed by doctors, nurses and other providers in 2013 were empty even when hospitals were at their busiest, according to state records. That's nearly 4 of every 10 beds lying vacant.

“I think it's clear that there are more beds than necessary right now and that the need for inpatient beds is declining, not increasing,” says Arnie Kimmel, CEO of Franciscan St. James Health, which has hospitals in Olympia Fields and Chicago Heights. “That raises a whole host of unpleasant questions, like which hospital should close or be consolidated.”


Hospitals often are major employers in areas that may not have many other jobs. In addition to reducing access to care for the poor and elderly, closings could severely damage the local economy. And there's no mechanism for coordinating consolidation across separate ownership groups.
Excess supply? Time to lower prices?