Handbook of Healthcare Analytics

11 Inpatient Care

Van‐Anh Truong

Columbia University

Inpatients are those who are formally admitted to a hospital for at least one night, taking up a room, a bed, and board. Inpatient areas in a hospital include intensive care units, general nursing wards, delivery wards, and neonatal care units (Hulshof et al. 2012).

Hospitals are most often measured by the size of the inpatient wards, more precisely by the number of beds in these wards. The American Hospital Association's 2017 survey estimates that there are 5,564 registered hospitals in the US and 897,961 staffed beds in these hospitals. Thus, the wards in a hospital contain 161 beds on average (American Hospital Association, 2017).

The management of inpatients is generally accepted to be important for several reasons. As Dong and Perry 2016 first pointed out, and Kc and Terwiesch 2009, Richardson 2002, Trzeciak and Rivers 2003 later showed empirically, delays in admission to inpatient wards lead to an increase in length of stays, higher mortality rates, and increased probabilities for readmission. Second, these delays tend to propagate to units that feed into the inpatient ward, such as the emergency department (ED), intensive care units (ICU), post‐anesthesia care units (PACU), and operating rooms (OR) (Jacobson et al., 2006; Argo et al., 2009; McGowan et al., 2007). This problem, called boarding, is a major contributor to overcrowding in EDs (Asplin and Magid, 2007; Trzeciak and Rivers, 2003). Third, inefficiencies ...