Inpatient care involves an overnight stay in a healthcare facility, while outpatient care does not. Outpatient care can include services like doctor’s visits, lab work, and same-day surgeries. The increase in outpatient services is due to improved medical treatments and cost reduction.
Inpatient and outpatient are common medical terms that can be used to describe a variety of treatments or facilities available to patients. Some medical establishments, such as hospitals, may offer both types of care, depending on the needs of the people involved. The terms can be confusing, but there are several key differences that can help make them understandable.
Outpatient care can refer to any type of service offered that does not include an overnight stay in a health care facility. The typical doctor’s office visit is outpatient, but so is surgery in a hospital where the patient goes home the same day. Blood tests, lab work, X-rays, mammograms, and the like are usually outpatient and can take a few hours to perform. However, such tests may also be performed on those who are hospitalized. Similarly a same day surgery can become hospitalization if complications arise and the person has to be hospitalized overnight.
The term is not exclusive to the types of care offered by a hospital, laboratory, or doctor’s office. It can also be applied to clinics or facilities that do not have night care plans. Clinics or sports medicine facilities, for example, might be called outpatients because patients who use the facilities go home at night. Surgical centers can specialize in same-day surgeries and transfer patients requiring extended care to inpatient care centers. There are even drug and mental health treatment programs conducted on a “daycare” basis, where people could spend most of the day in such a program and then spend the evenings at home.
It can be a bit confusing when some clinics have overnight facilities but also offer day care services. A mental health facility might offer day care services and also have a thriving inpatient program. Alternatively, people could switch from inpatient care to outpatient care.
Many have noted the significantly increased number of programs, medical treatments, and even surgeries and major medical procedures that are no longer inpatient. It is certainly true that medical programs have attempted to reduce hospital care. There are several reasons for this reduction.
First, it has been noted that not all medical conditions require overnight hospitalization. While it used to be common to hospitalize people for conditions like pneumonia, improved drug treatment means far fewer people actually have to stay in hospital unless they have aggressive forms of pneumonia or other very serious conditions. It has been found that the quality of rest and care is often better at home than in a hospital setting. Other refinements in medicine, such as improvements in surgical technique and anesthesiology, have also led to the reduction of the types of surgeries that require night-time hospital care.
Another thing driving the increase in outpatient services is the cost factor. It costs much more to admit patients overnight or for several nights than to send them home. When it is safe for a patient to recover at home, it significantly reduces the cost of medical care. An added benefit of hospital care reduction is that it helps save space in already crowded hospitals for those people who really need the most extensive care a hospital can provide.
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