News: U.S. predicted to reach 85% hospital occupancy by 2032, article suggests

A new study published in JAMA Network Open has provided a bleak forecast for hospital occupancy in the United States.

The article examined national U.S. hospital occupancy data from 2009 to 2019, finding that the mean occupancy range occurred from 63%-66%. In the year following the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, this number increased to 75.3%.

“Without changes in the hospitalization rate or staffed hospital bed supply, total annual hospitalizations were projected to increase from 36,174,000 in 2025 to 40,177,000 in 2035 with the aging population,” the authors of the study wrote. “This would correspond to a national hospital occupancy of approximately 85% by 2032 for adult beds and by 2035 for adult and pediatric beds combined.”

According to the report, the root cause of this “persistently elevated occupancy” level is not to be found in a changing number of hospitalizations, but, rather, in the “16% reduction in the number of staffed U.S. hospital beds.”

"I've been doing this for almost 40 years now and I've been hearing about how everybody's going to be cared for at home and we don't need hospital beds anymore, but I've got 100 people holding in my ED that tell me very differently about what their needs are and how they're going to be cared for," Amy Mansue, Inspira Health president and CEO, told HealthLeaders.

The problem, according to the researchers, could be solved either by increasing the staffed hospital bed supply by 10%, reducing the hospitalization rate by 10%, or some combination of the two.

Editor’s note: To read the JAMA article, click here. To read the HealthLeaders article, click here.