Guide · Capacity
Hospital bed and ICU capacity tracking: knowing who can admit before the ambulance leaves.
When capacity is reported by phone, the first sign that an ICU is full is an ambulance turned away at the gate.
What capacity tracking should cover
| Resource | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| ICU beds | The scarcest bed; the most costly to get wrong |
| Oxygen | A hospital with beds but no oxygen cannot admit some patients |
| Ventilators | Needed for the most critical cases |
| General beds | Overflow and step-down capacity |
| Ambulances | Where they are and where they are heading |
How to set it up
- Map every facility in the state with its district and type.
- Pull ICU, oxygen and ventilator availability from hospital systems on a fixed, frequent refresh.
- Show when each hospital last reported; treat stale numbers as unknown, not as free beds.
- Join ambulance dispatch to the same map.
- When a hospital nears full, suggest where new patients should go instead.
- Notify dispatch of the diversion, and log who approved it and when.
Common mistakes
- Capacity collected by phone calls once or twice a day.
- A single “beds available” number that mixes ICU and general beds.
- No timestamp, so a morning figure is read as current in the evening.
- Diversion decided after the ambulance has already arrived.
How HealthWatch does it
HealthWatch is a public-health command centre for health secretaries, mission directors and district health officers. It pulls surveillance and HMIS data, lab results and facility reports per district; refreshes ICU, oxygen and ventilator availability every 15 minutes; and joins helpline cases and ambulance response to the same districts. Cases are compared with the seasonal baseline by block, clusters are raised with evidence, and every exception is ranked and assigned to a district or hospital owner. Each district gets a morning brief on WhatsApp with decisions that close in one tap, and every exception keeps its owner, time and closure for the weekly review. Every number keeps its source and timestamp, so stale or estimated data is never hidden. It runs on web and WhatsApp, on managed cloud, in your own VPC or on-premises.
Clinical and programme decisions stay with your health officials and their protocols; the command centre puts the evidence and the owner in front of them sooner.
Questions
How do states track ICU bed availability?
By pulling ICU, oxygen and ventilator availability from hospital systems on a frequent refresh and showing it on one map with the time each hospital last reported.
What is ambulance diversion?
Sending an ambulance to a hospital that can admit the patient, instead of one that is full, decided before the ambulance arrives.
Why show when capacity was last updated?
A bed figure from the morning may be wrong by evening. Showing the timestamp stops stale numbers being read as current.
See it on your own data. HealthWatch — Outbreaks and ICU load, one screen. Book a 30-minute working session with an engineer.