Inpatient Services

Inpatient services are medical care provided to patients confined within a hospital setting as opposed to those provided by ambulatory/outpatient facilities. Although these services are most typically provided in an acute care setting, they are not necessarily provided within an acute care general hospital. They may be provided in other, more specialized facilities such as psychiatric institutions or other long-term care settings.

Inpatient services as defined by federal regulators are those requiring admission to the hospital. The definition is not dependent on the complexity of the services provided. These admissions may be broken down into short-stay and long-stay varieties. A short stay in U.S. hospitals is typically considered to be less than 24 hours, although other North American health care systems such as Canada’s may define a short stay to be as long as 59 days.

A trend developed in the 1980s and 1990s whereby many services previously provided on an inpatient basis were shifted to the ambulatory setting, usually driven by the fact that they could be provided there at lower costs. The changing demographics of the North American population, however, will cause increasing demand for inpatient services throughout the early part of the 21st century.

The population’s aging brings with it more chronic, long-term illness and medical admissions. The shift toward these types of admissions and away from procedural and surgical admissions will result in more admissions with longer average length of stays, resulting in an effective increase in inpatient census. This increase will require the development of additional inpatient beds and capacity in many parts of the nation in contrast to the previously perceived excesses of the 1980s.