As treatments get less invasive and recovery times shrink, the “bedless hospital” is emerging, according to an article on the Stat website.
They have all the capabilities of traditional hospitals: operating rooms, infusion suites, and even emergency rooms and helipads — everything but overnight beds.
A $48 million bedless hospital recently opened near Cleveland, Ohio, is expected to serve about 3,000 people in the first year.
The growth in outpatient healthcare is a fundamental shift in US medicine, the article said.
MetroHealth, which gets part of its funding from taxpayers and serves a large Medicaid population, has expanded outpatient visits from 850,000 to 1.2 million in the last four years, a 40 percent increase.
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