Predicting acute care hospital bed need through physician inpatient activity modeling: first steps

This paper presents a useful method for predicting acute care hospital bed needs through an inpatient activity model based upon physician characteristics. Ratios of physician inpatient activity by specialty from one age decade to the next were computed from the authors' data base of 1.2% of all "admitting" physicians in the United States and applied to current physician inpatient activity to predict future activity. Desired lengths of stay, occupancy, and other standards were used to translate future activity into bed need. Different and more comprehensive models are being worked on by the authors. These include analyses using a greater number of endogenous and exogenous variables and models in which DRG's are substituted for patient days as the dependent variable.