In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare environment, hospitals are under constant pressure to maintain efficient patient flow – a critical factor that influences everything from operational performance to patient care and overall experience.
However, many hospitals are struggling to meet these goals, stalled by a combination of workforce shortages, capacity constraints, and inefficient processes that lead to delays in patient throughput. These challenges, exacerbated by the ongoing strain on healthcare resources, are forcing health systems to rethink their approaches to managing inpatient capacity.
The Inpatient Capacity Optimization Report: A Window into Hospital Challenges
A new report sheds light on the severity of these issues, highlighting firsthand experiences from health system leaders across the country navigating these complex obstacles. The State of Inpatient Capacity Optimization collected data from 22 U.S. academic, community, and religious health systems across 29 states, with a footprint of nearly 450 hospitals with over 77,500 beds. Nearly all hospital leaders identify staffing constraints and inefficient discharges as the biggest barriers to patient flow. The report outlines the innovative solutions some hospitals are embracing to overcome these challenges.
Key findings include:
- Over 90% of respondents cited staffing as a severe or moderate pain point.
- Nearly 84% said discharge process breakdowns are some of the biggest bottlenecks impacting patient throughput.
- Over 75% reported fragmented or inconsistent communication across discharge stakeholders.
- More than 64% identified staff resistance to change, limited implementation resources, and misalignment with organizational goals as the most common obstacles.
These challenges emphasize the critical need for innovative strategies to help hospitals improve patient flow, and they make clear that integration across systems is essential for operational efficiency and effective decision-making.
What’s Working: People, Process, and AI-Powered Technology
The report outlines strategies that health system leaders are employing to address patient flow challenges, from command centers to flexible staffing models.
- Next-Generation Command Centers: More than 50% of respondents operate an active command center to transform operations and improve access. Integrating real-time data and prescriptive analytics has become a key feature of command centers, allowing hospitals to both monitor and predict future patient flow, bed availability, and staffing needs. Additionally, command centers are evolving to be not only a physical set of rooms but a sophisticated digital and mobile strategy that supercharges system-wide coordination and visibility.
- Enhanced Care Team Coordination: Hospitals that have enhanced communication and coordination across care teams – especially around discharge planning – are seeing improvements in patient throughput. Enhanced utilization of discharge lounges and proactive capacity planning, particularly in units where bed demand is anticipated, are among the key solutions. More than 75% of respondents identified proactive capacity planning as their top strategy for avoiding emergency department and inpatient boarding. AI-driven predictions and automated alerts that allow teams to avoid discharge issues, rather than react to them, have also shown success.
- Flexible Staffing Models: With staffing being a major challenge, hospitals are adopting flexible staffing strategies to support patient care needs and manage fluctuations in patient demand. This includes the use of float pools, cross-training staff, and utilizing predictive analytics to forecast staffing needs. Additionally, more than 83% of respondents found adjusting nurse-to-patient ratios based on demand to be a helpful strategy. These approaches allow for nimble allocation of resources, reducing bottlenecks caused by nurse-to-patient imbalances. They also create consistency in staff deployment, which may lead to higher satisfaction and retention of staff.
- Action-oriented Governance: Clear governance structures and the alignment of strategic goals across the organization are essential to driving change. Hospital leaders are setting up accountability frameworks supported by reliable, real-time data and analytics, and engaging stakeholders to ensure that staff across all levels are aligned with the hospital’s mission to optimize patient flow. The desire for better collection of feedback from frontline workers was present in over half of the survey’s respondents, underlining the importance of staff perspectives in driving change. Continuous performance tracking through KPIs and regular feedback loops have helped sustain momentum.
How AI is Supercharging Innovation
AI-powered tools are at the heart of many of these strategies, enabling hospitals to move beyond historical approaches to managing inpatient capacity and instead create the inpatient unit of the future, one that benefits both staff and patients. Solutions like LeanTaaS' iQueue for Inpatient Flow empower hospital leaders and frontline teams to make informed decisions that are backed by real-time data, informed by predictive analytics, and executed by automated workflows. When patient flow is more proactively managed in this way, bottlenecks are reduced, throughput is improved, and resource utilization is optimized.
iQueue for Inpatient Flow has demonstrated transformative improvements in key operational metrics for hospitals, including:
- 10% more discharges per day
- 30% reduction in transfer declines
- 10% decrease in opportunity days
- 3% increase in patient admissions
By implementing AI-powered solutions like iQueue, health systems build resilient, efficient, and patient-centered operations that are better equipped to meet both current demands and future challenges.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Patient Flow Optimization
The challenges of managing inpatient capacity are unlikely to subside anytime soon. According to projections from the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, by 2036, the healthcare industry will face shortages of over 68,000 primary care physicians, 62,400 psychologists, 42,100 psychiatrists, 6,600 obstetrician-gynecologists, and more than 33,000 family medicine physicians. This only heightens the pressure on hospitals to optimize patient flow and do more with the resources they have available.
In light of these pressures, hospitals must continue adapting and evolving to meet the needs of both patients and healthcare workers. Those that embrace innovative solutions will be better equipped to manage the complexities of inpatient care, ensuring timely access to quality care and sustainable operations in the long run.
To learn more, download the special report: The State of Inpatient Capacity Optimization