Advisory Board February 25, 2025
According to a new study published in JAMA Network Open, the United States may face a hospital bed shortage by 2032 as average hospital occupancy continues to grow after the pandemic.
Study details and key findings
For the study, researchers used CDC’s COVID-19 data tracking dashboards to collect hospital occupancy metrics for almost every U.S. hospital between Aug. 2, 2020, and April 27, 2024. Then, the researchers combined this data with national hospital rates and official population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau to estimate future hospital occupancy scenarios through 2035.
Hospital occupancy is determined by the hospital census divided by number of staffed hospital beds.
According to the researchers, the average national hospital occupancy...
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