As we go through this pandemic, an numbers rises. And with Hospitals an Urgent Care beds being filled. Limited spaces With limited supplies, an social distancing in order. Will circumstances change?
According To Health Affairs Statistics:
SETTING AND DATA
Sound Physicians is a national medical group specializing in hospital medicine, critical care, and emergency medicine. It employs or contracts with almost 4,000 physicians across a wide range of hospital settings—most commonly community hospitals with 100–500 beds.
At most of the hospitals where it is based, Sound is the exclusive hospital medicine provider and manages the majority of hospital admissions and discharges. Sound serves many hospitals in states hit relatively hard by the first COVID-19 surge, including Washington, Michigan, and Ohio; although it serves no hospitals in New York City, it serves several in the broader metropolitan area. It is also well represented in states with lower initial COVID-19 prevalence but later surges, including Texas, Arizona, and California.
This analysis was based on data from 201 hospitals in 36 states. As detailed in the online appendix,17 we excluded Sound hospital practices not operating continuously from 2019 through 2020, those with critical care but not hospital medicine programs, and one hospital with fewer than fifty admissions in 2020. Our sample size was 1,056,951, including 505,060 admissions in 2020 and 551,891 admissions in 2019.
Data used for this analysis were collated in near–real time and derived from two sources. First, data from hospitals’ administrative systems provide information about patients’ characteristics, including age, dates of admission and discharge, ZIP code of residence, primary payer, and status at discharge.
Second, Sound’s electronic medical record and billing platform provides clinical diagnoses (with International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, or ICD-10 codes) supplied by treating physicians and identifies patients with COVID-19 infection.
With regard to the latter, physicians are prompted on every patient admission, “Is this patient being treated for COVID-19 infection?” For this analysis we counted all patients with a “yes” response from physicians, regardless of whether test results were positive, negative, or still pending at discharge.
My question is, “Will this change?”
