Bmc Health Serv Res
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Bmc Health Serv Res · Dec 2020
Balancing revenue generation with capacity generation: case distribution, financial impact and hospital capacity changes from cancelling or resuming elective surgeries in the US during COVID-19.
To increase bed capacity and resources, hospitals have postponed elective surgeries, although the financial impact of this decision is unknown. We sought to report elective surgical case distribution, associated gross hospital revenue and regional hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) bed capacity as elective surgical cases are cancelled and then resumed under simulated trends of COVID-19 incidence. ⋯ Procedures involving the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and digestive system account for the largest loss of hospital gross revenue when elective surgery is postponed. As hospital bed capacity increases following the COVID-19 pandemic, restoring volume of these elective cases will help maintain revenue. In these estimates, adopting universal masking would help to avoid overcapacity in all states.