40 Hospitals in NY Forced to Stop Elective Surgery As COVID-19 Surges

Forty hospitals in New York must stop all in-hospital elective surgeries as the state battles rising levels of COVID-19, the state’s Department of Health announced over the weekend. The order impacts all hospitals in certain regions, including Mohawk Valley, Finger Lakes, and Central New York.

The announcement comes as New York sees a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. New York Governor Kathy Hochul reported over 11,700 hospitalizations due to COVID-19 on Saturday, January, 8, 2022. Hospitalizations were down slightly compared to the previous day, but dozens of hospitals are located in regions considered high risk based on their occupancy rates.

Regions are considered high risk and hospitals must postpone elective surgeries if 90 percent or more beds are occupied based on the seven-day average. Alternatively, regions are considered high risk is there is an 85 to 90 percent occupancy rate based on the previous seven-day average and a new COVID-19 hospital admission rate for the region greater than 4 percent.

The New York State Department of Health said that the 40 facilities in the high-risk regions will not be able to perform “non-essential, non-urgent elective procedures” for at least the next two weeks based on an assessment performed weekly by the Department.

If hospital occupancy exceeds 95 percent, the hospitals will also have to stop elective surgeries at hospital-owned ambulatory surgical centers for a minimum of two weeks.

The New York State Department of Health uses data reported by hospitals through the Health Electronic Response Data System to determine a region’s risk and notifies facilities within the region on Fridays. Hospitals must then postpone elective surgeries by the following Thursday.

The action is part of a November 2021 Executive Order that authorizes the state to order the postponement of non-essential elective procedures in order to “ensure hospital capacity statewide is able to meet regional needs while maintaining the long-term resiliency of the State's healthcare infrastructure,” the announcement stated.

“We will use every available tool to help ensure that hospitals can manage the COVID-19 winter surge,” Acting State Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett, MD, said over the weekend. “I want to remind New Yorkers that getting vaccinated and boosted remain the best way to protect against serious illness and hospitalization from COVID-19. Vaccination also protects our hospital system. We cannot return to the early months of the pandemic when hospitals were overwhelmed.”

Delaying non-emergent care was common during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the action significantly cost hospitals. One study from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia showed that three hospitals affiliated with the health system lost a total of $99 million in net revenue from all surgical departments between March and July 2020. The department of surgery also lost $58 million during that first wave of the virus.

Hospitals also face long-term cost from delaying surgical care since patients may face worse outcomes without near-term intervention for their conditions. This can lead to more utilization and ultimately higher costs in the long term, researchers stated.

“Whenever possible, we should not delay surgical care for our patients,” said the first study’s lead investigator, Daniel M. Mazzaferro, MD, MBA, a plastic surgery resident at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Surgery is a critical asset to the survivability of a [healthcare] system.”

Hospitals lost billions of dollars in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the pandemic. According to an estimate from the American Hospital Association (AHA), the losses would lead more than a third of US hospitals with negative operating margins by the end of 2021.

However, delaying non-emergent care during surges of COVID-19 hospitalizations is one of the few tools hospital leaders and policymakers currently have to combat surges of the virus.

New York plans to keep mandatory postponements short as long as occupancy rates allow and does not include key services as part of the requirement. Those services include cancer care (including diagnostic procedure of suspected cancer), neurosurgery, intractable pain services, procedures for highly symptomatic patients, transplants, trauma services, cardiac procedures for patients with symptoms, limb threatening vascular procedures, dialysis vascular access, and services for patients that are at a clinically high risk of harm if their procedures are not completed.

To view a complete list of hospitals impacted by the recent announcement, click here.