Transparency as a Solution for COVID-19 Related Hospital Capacity Issues

In the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, many U.S. hospitals could not provide an adequate supply of beds to meet demand. Solving the problem of hospital bed capacity is of great importance in the “new normal,” which requires recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses and there will be an ongoing need for hospital-based care. When looked at globally, the U.S. has relatively low numbers of hospital beds—only 2.8 beds per thousand compared to 8.0 beds per thousand people in Germany. Past attempts to compensate for hospital bed shortages through sharing capacity have generally failed, in part, because of the persistence of an independent hospital culture and lack of transparency . Better coordination among facilities could potentially alleviate the issue. Analysis revealed 189 metropolitan area hospitals and 224 metro intensive care units having high coefficients of variation in occupancy, showing the extent of variability in relation to the mean of the population. A Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) standard for hospital surge capacity plans will alleviate this problem by causing hospitals to form networks for surges and providing widely read, easily accessible transparency of their plans. The focused FASB is more capable of addressing the capacity issue than the over burdened, $1.4 trillion HHS, which is commonly looked to for a solution.