Hospital medicine

Hospital medicine is the specialty focused on coordinating and providing inpatient care for hospitalized adults, often across multiple medical conditions and consulting services.

Hospitalist: A physician whose practice centers on caring for hospitalized patients. Hospitalists are the clinicians who commonly lead hospital medicine teams.
Hospital: A healthcare institution that provides inpatient treatment and related diagnostic and emergency services. Hospital medicine is organized around the hospital as its principal care setting.
Hospitalist movement: The development of hospital-based physician practice as a distinct model of inpatient care. This movement established hospital medicine as a recognizable specialty.
Primary care: First-contact, continuous healthcare that addresses a broad range of health needs over time. Hospitalists manage acute admissions, while primary care clinicians usually follow patients across settings.
Length of stay: The duration between a patient’s hospital admission and discharge. Hospitalist programs are often evaluated partly by their effects on inpatient stay duration.
Inpatient care: Medical care delivered to patients admitted to a hospital or other healthcare facility. Hospital medicine organizes care around admission through discharge.
Internal medicine: The medical specialty concerned with preventing, diagnosing, and treating diseases in adults. Hospital medicine grew largely from the inpatient practice of internal medicine.
Robert Wachter: An American physician and health-services researcher associated with the development of hospital medicine. Wachter helped name and define the hospitalist role in the 1990s.
Intensive care medicine: The specialty providing continuous, advanced support for patients with life-threatening illness or injury. Hospital medicine covers general inpatient care; intensive care focuses on critical illness.
Hospital readmission: A return hospital admission after a previous discharge, commonly measured within a specified period. Readmissions test how well inpatient treatment and discharge transitions support recovery.

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