Nearly 100 new beds approved for Mass. General

State regulators on Wednesday approved a request from Massachusetts General Hospital to add nearly 100 new beds to its massive downtown construction project, the hospital said. In a statement, Mass. General said the Massachusetts Public Health Council unanimously approved a “net increase of 94 licensed inpatient beds” at the hospital. The State House News Service previously reported on the approval. The beds, the hospital said, will become available gradually with the phased opening of a new clinical building along Cambridge Street in 2027 and will help alleviate a capacity crisis that often forces patients to wait for extended periods in the Emergency Department for a bed. The hospital initially asked to add the same number of beds when it first proposed its new, $1.8 billion Philip and Susan Ragon Building, which is currently under construction. The new building will be home to the Mass General Cancer Center and will include inpatient rooms as well as exam rooms, operating rooms, and an underground parking garage, according to the project’s website. But though state regulators in 2022 approved the tower — largely intended to transition from double to single rooms — they blocked the addition of the beds over concerns that they could increase health care costs. The Department of Public Health said then that MGH could come back with the proposal to add beds later. Paul Hattis, a senior fellow at the Lown Institute, a Needham-based health care think tank, called the approval “puzzling,” given the state Department of Public Health had previously rejected the proposal to add the inpatient beds as too costly. MGH said in January that nearly every day for the prior 16 months, its emergency department had been so full that all the hospital’s inpatient beds and monitored hallway stretchers were full. On some occasions, the hospital has triggered “capacity disaster” status, a term used to denote that more than 45 inpatients have been admitted to the hospital but are stuck in the emergency department, because there isn’t yet a bed available for them.