A measure of institutional use, usually measured as the number of inpatients at a specified time (e.g., midnight).
The total number of inpatient service days, for all patients, during a specified period of time (for example, a month). Ordinarily this number will be expressed in three segments—adult days, pediatric days, and newborn days—since there almost certainly will be a desire to relate the usage in these three segments to the “adult inpatient bed count,” the “newborn bed count,” and the “pediatric inpatient bed count.” Each bed count multiplied by the number of days in the period gives the “available bed days,” the denominator in computing the occupancy rate.
The basic time unit for calculating the cost of keeping a patient in a hospital for 1 day.