Washington State is one of 37 states in the US that requires hospitals to go through a review process, called a Certificate Of Need (CON) review, to expand most medical services they provide, including the number of beds they can have available.
The point of the CON is to help keep healthcare costs down by preventing an excess of health services opening that will consume provider dollars, do not add value to healthcare services, and create costs that could be passed on to patients already struggling with hospital bills.
Others believe it simply hampers the process of getting higher quality healthcare to patients without providing any significant reduction in costs.
Providence Everett Medical Center often has all 243 beds on the Colby campus filled. They applied for 166 additional beds and were granted an expansion of 106 beds by the Washington Department of Health. Read coverage by the Everett Herald: http://tinyurl.com/ProvCert
This is how the Department of Health describes the CON review:
"The CON program is a regulatory process that requires certain health care providers to obtain state approval before offering certain new or expanded services.
For example, a CON would be required if a hospital wishes to establish a comprehensive medical rehabilitation program or to initiate certain specialized services.
The CON process is intended to help ensure that new services proposed by health care providers are needed for quality patient care within a particular region or community"
Here is a great flowchart of the complicated process for a CON from the Washington Policy Center:
http://www.washingtonpolicy.org/images/healthcare/conprocess.pdf
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