Throughout the UCHealth system, we strove to optimize our hospital bed capacity across 12 hospitals and 2,000 beds. A key challenge we faced was continuous “crisis management” of our inpatient capacity. This was exacerbated by the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. We realized we needed to move from being a reactive organization to a proactive one, strategizing ahead of emergencies. With new variants of the virus on the rise as well as flu season ahead, maintaining this proactive management continues to be critical.
Our organization is now better prepared to handle fluctuations in inpatient bed demand than we were in the past. Even before COVID-19, we realized we needed a new approach to inpatient bed management.