When the crowd arrives: Technology’s role in helping ensure hospital beds are open

Why do large-scale events put hospitals at capacity risk?

Dr. Watts categorizes the major event types that can affect large amounts of people at once and overwhelm a hospital’s capacity:

• Weather-and natural-disaster-related events, including both heat-related incidents in summer months and natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods and various storms
• Infectious disease entrants, especially for events attracting international crowds
• Hazardous chemicals
• Mass-casualty incidents

Any known or unknown large-scale event—a sporting event, a concert, a parade or a natural disaster—can earn heightened attention across a hospital and health system.

Thankfully, Dr. Watts notes, most of these events pass without incident. But proper preparedness is built for the day that one does not—and few examples test a region’s readiness like a global sporting event at the scale of the 2026 FIFA World Cup: more than 100 matches across 16 cities in three countries, Canada, Mexico and the United States, with a record 48 countries competing over nearly six weeks of matches. For the hospitals and health systems in those cities, the tournament is a stress test measured not in goals but in available beds.

Dr. Watts further explains, “we consider these ‘higher risk events’ simply due to the amount of people that could be impacted, and prepare our hospital for the day before, the day of and the day after,” she says. “Preparation for a major event can begin a year out, and for an event at the scale of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it began two years ahead, the moment host cities were confirmed.”

What does hospital and care readiness actually look like?

For the most part, with large-scale mass gatherings, nothing significantly impacting people’s health occurs. From Dr. Watts’ perspective, “nine out of 10 times, nothing happens, and that’s exactly what we hope for,” she explains. “At the same time, there is is that chance—that one out of 10 times that something does happen. And for those improbable yet possible moments, we prioritize preparation so that if something major occurs, we are ready.” 

The 2024 Kansas City parade celebrating the city’s team for a Super Bowl win became that one-in-10 moment, she notes, when a mass shooting wounded 23 people, including 11 children.

From previous experience, such as the aftermath of the 2024 Kansas City parade, as well as hospital capacity strains during COVID-19, a north star for Dr. Watts is a concrete goal of hospital bed capacity at 20 percent, which she describes as “an art and a science logistically.”

Technology’s role in helping achieve hospital bed capacity

Technology has become central to clearing that bar. “GE HealthCare’s technology has helped us better understand our hospital’s capacity in general. For these types of events in particular, the technology helps us achieve our goal of 20 percent open bed capacity in critical moments,” Dr. Watts says, pointing to the Patient Progression Hub, which runs on Command Center software, for its system-wide view of patient progression, operational capacity, and discharge and transfer readiness information.

Such real-time capacity tools are designed to shift hospitals from reactive to proactive management. “When there is a hospital capacity surge, every second counts,” says Bree Bush, General Manager, Command Center and CareIntellect at GE HealthCare. “We are developing solutions that not only give a real-time picture but crucially help them predict what’s coming and the insights they need to take action.”

Getting to ‘yes’ faster: the criticality of cross-health system collaboration

Dr. Watts’ most ambitious work extends beyond her own walls. She leads what she proudly calls the first U.S. regional Pediatric Medical Operations Coordination Center (PMOCC) spanning across four states. The purpose of PMOCC is to solve a problem that has long slowed emergency response: When one hospital is overwhelmed, how can you find another that can take a child to provide the proper level of care?

“In an area that is overwhelmed, we need to get to a ‘yes’ faster. ‘Yes,’ another hospital is able to properly care for a patient; ‘yes’ proper care can occur much faster,” Dr. Watts says.  This is critical information for hospitals and healthcare workers to understand as patients begin to flood hospital and emergency rooms at times when they are simply unable to open additional hospital capacity and beds, she further explains. 

In these cases, the shift that technology helps enable is the move away from manual and time-consuming phone calls of overwhelmed healthcare professionals to the ability to access shared data, in real time. “Instead of our healthcare teams making phone calls across hospitals over U.S. state lines, we now have real-time information we can see to better understand capacity and make the most data-informed decisions at the right time for the right patient,” Dr. Watts states.

Hospital capacity misconceptions: from the general public to a child’s specific needs

One misconception Dr. Watts wants to dismantle is more personal to her work: the belief that children are resilient and can bounce back from trauma and sustain little impact. With approximately 25-30 percent of those injured during a disaster being children, the care required is simply different, Dr. Watts notes. “Children have specific needs, and there can be long-term impacts,” she cautions. “If a child was impacted by a highly traumatic incident, and we do not address it, the child can sustain longer-term impacts. A child’s needs are different, and they must be prioritized.”

It is a fitting close to a conversation that began with risk and ended with shared responsibility. For Dr. Watts, the open bed capacity; technology’s enablement of shared data and real-time operational visibility across hospitals within regional networks; the faster ‘yes’ for optimal care; all serve a single conviction. “Children, and their health—optimal health—are the future for all of us,” she says. When the world arrives this summer, hospitals like hers will be ready precisely because that belief was never left to chance.