Study Links High Hospital Occupancy to Higher Death Risk

Study patients were admitted after being seen in the ED for heart attack, congestive heart failure, stroke, pneumonia, hip fracture or gastrointestinal bleeding.

"Hospital occupancy changes from day to day, so patients shouldn't try to choose a hospital based on its occupancy level," said co-author Matthew M. Davis, MD, co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at the UMHS. "But these kinds of study findings should prompt hospitals to look at the flow of patients and processes of their care teams during high occupancy times. Those are more challenging moments when more things can go wrong."

The UMHS study also examined the impact of "access block" when a full hospital prevents ED patients from accessing an inpatient hospital bed. While a wave of accident victims to the ED is impossible to predict, hospital administrators can control occupancy by managing the number of elective surgical cases scheduled for admission.

The authors said restricting these profitable procedures can cost hospitals money since they've become increasingly important to hospital finances in recent years. "However if access block is a true phenomenon, a hospital full of elective surgical admissions may be limited in its ability to safely handle an influx of urgent admissions through the ED," Schilling said.