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0:00
Hello, I'm Regina Herzlinger
and I'm the McPherson
Professor at
the Harvard Business
School and I have
a specialty in
healthcare innovation.
I was like all of us, very
concerned about
the COVID crisis,
and one aspect of it particularly
caught my attention,
and that is the shortage of
hospital beds in the US,
but really, all over the world,
to treat COVID patients
and to treat patients who
do not have COVID that urgently
needed a hospital bed.
0:46
Well, the problem
is that in the US,
even though it
spends twice as much
as any other developed
country on health care,
we have far fewer hospital beds.
We have 2.8 beds per
1000 people versus
eight beds per 1000 people
for a pretty good
system like Germany.
But even the systems
that had far more beds
than in the US ran
into problems at
the height of the COVID
epidemic, they could
not treat enough of
the COVID patients
and they certainly
couldn't treat
many people who urgently
needed the hospital beds.
1:38
Why are there so few beds?
Well in the US the issue
is that hospitals
are reimbursed very,
very well for
surgical procedures,
but they are not
reimbursed so well for
medical procedures and
surgical procedures,
due to advances in technology
and in the workflow
for surgeries,
can be done very
quickly, much more
quickly than medical
procedures on a whole.
On the average, when
there is no epidemic,
there is not a great need
for hospital beds and
American hospitals
are usually at
about 77 percent of occupancy.
But when you have very
few beds, and this awful
epidemic hits, it's
a real problem and
is a real problem,
not only in the US,
but in virtually all other
developed countries.
