https://medicalxpress.com/hospital-medicine-news/ en-us Latest medical news and research in Hospital medicine Pulse oximeter devices routinely overestimate blood oxygen levels in darker-skinned patients—a racial bias that can trigger downstream health harms for Black individuals, compounding well beyond any single inaccurate reading. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-pulse-oximeter-bias-linked-gaps.html Mon, 25 May 2026 11:20:02 EDT news698925541 Health care has lost its human, moral, and relational foundations and must reconnect with its core values to improve both patient and staff well-being, argue experts in The BMJ. Despite unprecedented advances in diagnostic precision, therapeutic capability, and computational power, a deep paradox exists, say authors Don Berwick, Maureen Bisognano and Bob Klaber. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-health-moral-emergency-experts.html Wed, 20 May 2026 18:30:01 EDT news698479707 A large study presented at the 2026 ATS International Conference shows that patients treated for COPD or pneumonia experience worse outcomes across several important measures when they are treated at hospitals that have been acquired by private equity firms. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-outcomes-lung-conditions-worse-private.html Tue, 19 May 2026 09:10:01 EDT news698309927 Within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), 30% of hospitalizations for alcohol use disorder (AUD) result in medications for AUD (MAUD) initiation as an inpatient or within seven days of discharge, according to a study published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-medications-hospitalizations-alcohol-disorder-veterans.html Thu, 14 May 2026 22:40:01 EDT news697972096 Despite their crucial function, public hospitals often face limited resources and financial distress, and an aging population can further exacerbate any imbalances in medical resource distribution. Furthermore, the proportion of aging individuals is not uniform across the country; in Japan, this has led to regional disparities in health care for the elderly. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-hospitals-elderly-patients-local-beds.html Thu, 14 May 2026 14:40:01 EDT news697987895 Researchers from some of the UK's leading academic institutions have warned that simply hiring more National Health service (NHS) staff will not be enough to reduce surgery backlogs, in research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The study has found that historically long backlogs continue to persist due to staff sickness and administrative instability, as opposed to workforce size. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-uk-nhs-surgery-backlogs-hiring.html Tue, 12 May 2026 21:40:01 EDT news697819741 A new study published in JAMA Network Open on May 7, 2026, engaged 42 national experts in hospital-based addiction treatment in a consensus-building process to develop best practices for hospital-initiated medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD). https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-addiction-experts-opioid-disorder-hospital.html Tue, 12 May 2026 18:00:04 EDT news697800751 An early warning system for sepsis, one of the deadliest infections for hospital patients, has been approved for use by the FDA, one of the first AI-based medical tools to get clearance. The tool, developed by Johns Hopkins University researchers and now commercialized by Bayesian Health, detects sepsis hours faster than doctors and has reduced deaths by nearly 20%. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-fda-early-sepsis.html Tue, 12 May 2026 11:40:07 EDT news697804201 A new study finds that large language models (LLMs), used with straightforward prompting, perform poorly on routine number-crunching tasks that hospital administrators depend on every day to track patients and allocate resources. The findings have been published in PLOS Digital Health by Eyal Klang of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, U.S., and colleagues. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-ai-language-struggle-basic-hospital.html Thu, 07 May 2026 17:50:03 EDT news697392062 At Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, just outside Los Angeles, patients on gurneys line the hallways of the emergency department waiting for care, and overflow mental health patients are consigned to outdoor tents. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-states-eye-aid-prop-distressed.html Thu, 07 May 2026 17:40:01 EDT news697359230 Hospital care teams make decisions that can have life-or-death consequences, and they do it as quickly as possible with information that's often incomplete. While spending several months in a neonatal intensive care unit, Abhijith Anand, an assistant professor of information systems at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, observed the case of a premature infant with "patent ductus arteriosus," a birth defect in the heart. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-nicu-decisions-hospital-analytics-investments.html Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:03 EDT news697358042 A new study led by researchers from Penn Nursing's Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) finds that safer nurse staffing levels in Pennsylvania hospitals could prevent thousands of deaths each year while improving care and providing savings that could finance better staffing. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-safe-staffing-policy-pennsylvania-deaths.html Tue, 05 May 2026 15:40:01 EDT news697208942 In recent decades, management consulting firms have become a fixture in the American health care system, wielding outsized influence compared to most other economic sectors. Hospitals navigating challenging financial and regulatory landscapes may call on these specialists for advice on strategic planning, cost-cutting, reorganizations, or revenue-boosting initiatives. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-nonprofit-hospitals-billions-effect.html Mon, 04 May 2026 11:00:07 EDT news697104482 More than 40% of older people admitted to U.S. hospitals have dementia, yet only half of them have been diagnosed with memory and cognitive difficulty. Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University investigators have developed a comprehensive screening method that identifies previously undiagnosed cognitive impairment and dementia in hospitalized patients. Their findings were published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-hospital-screening-method-cognitive-issues.html Mon, 04 May 2026 07:40:04 EDT news697097162 Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most common inherited blood disorder in the United States. Approximately 10% of people with SCD in the US live in New York State, with the majority residing in New York City. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-regional-differences-sickle-cell-disease.html Fri, 01 May 2026 11:00:01 EDT news696763081 In one of the largest studies to compare artificial intelligence and physicians on a wide array of clinical reasoning tasks including real emergency department data, a team of physicians and computer scientists at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center evaluated whether an AI system could do what physicians do every day: review a messy patient chart and use that information to determine diagnosis and next steps. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-ai-surpasses-physicians-clinical-tasks.html Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:00:02 EDT news696688261 An article titled "How Digital Twins Can Improve Health System Operations," written by Mark Crawford, explores how virtual replicas of entire hospital ecosystems are allowing administrators to test high-risk operational changes in a safe, digital environment before implementing them in the real world. The paper is published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-virtual-mirrors-hospital-patient-bottlenecks.html Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:00:01 EDT news696579777 Exclusive data published in The BMJ today show that 13,386 patients in England waited at least three days for A&E (accident and emergency) treatment last year, part of almost 500,000 who spent over 24 hours stuck in NHS emergency departments—before either being admitted, transferred, or discharged—in 2025. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-reveals-patients-days-england-emergency.html Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:30:05 EDT news696070321 A new featured report details how advances in remote monitoring and portable medical technology are dismantling the traditional hospital walls. The article, "Hospital-at-Home: New Technology Brings Acute Care to Patients' Homes," authored by JMIR Correspondent Jenna Congdon, examines the rapid shift toward acute-level care delivered in residential settings. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-remote-hospital-overcrowding.html Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:40:07 EDT news695986140 A new study from Penn Nursing's Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) published in Nursing Outlook finds that nurses' assessments of their staffing adequacy is a more accurate predictor of patient safety on medical surgical units than traditional administrative data. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-staffing-metrics-patient-falls.html Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:40:01 EDT news695977384 Cultures of silence among health care professionals remain a significant threat to patients and health care innovation, according to results from a national survey of more than 3,500 clinicians and health care administrators. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-silence-health-communication-failures-threaten.html Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:20:04 EDT news695984641 A single episode of delirium—a state of confusion and agitation—in hospitalized older adults is a significant risk factor for other serious health complications including fractures, stroke and sepsis, a University of Queensland study has found. Delirium is often triggered by infection, surgery, pain, dehydration or medication, which affects up to 1 in 4 older adults during a hospital stay. However, many of its long-term health impacts have not been fully understood. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-hospital-delirium-red-flag-severe.html Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:00:03 EDT news695374861 Despite increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, a new study led by Mass General Brigham researchers from the MESH Incubator shows that generative AI models continue to fall short in their clinical reasoning capabilities. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-ai-lacking-clinical-abilities-large.html Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:00:04 EDT news695293921 Older hospitalized patients who struggled with taking their medications correctly were 10% less likely to need to return to the hospital if they had a pharmacist's help at discharge, according to a new multisite clinical trial based at Cedars-Sinai. But the findings, published in JAMA Network Open, found the extra help didn't significantly reduce unplanned hospital visits for the rest of those 55 and older. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-hospital-discharge-day-trial-pharmacist.html Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:00:05 EDT news694684501 Just because a topical antiseptic is swabbed on the skin doesn't mean it stays on the skin. In a new study, Northwestern University scientists studied how a powerful antiseptic, called chlorhexidine, affects bacteria in hospital environments. To prevent infections, hospitals heavily rely on chlorhexidine wipes to sterilize patients' skin before procedures. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-disinfectants-microbes-hospital-rooms.html Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:02 EDT news694253341 Malnutrition not only negatively impacts health, but also causes poor healing and increased infection risks, lengthening hospital stays and further burdening an under-resourced system. One in three hospital patients are not being screened for malnutrition, despite the fact that 30%–40% of patients experience the issue, new Swinburne research has found. The study is published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-hospitals-malnutrition.html Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:40:01 EDT news694169366 The fast-paced, high-pressure environment often portrayed in emergency department TV dramas reflects a real challenge in hospitals: how to diagnose patients quickly and move them safely through care under intense time pressure. A new study from FIU Business finds that brief, structured team meetings among hospital staff—known as progression-of-care huddles—can significantly speed diagnosis and discharge times. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-hospital-huddles-decision-diagnosis-discharge.html Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:10:07 EDT news694109522 A new study led by investigators from Mass General Brigham and Yale School of Public Health reveals that red blood cell exchange transfusion (ET) may provide critical benefits for patients hospitalized with severe babesiosis. Babesiosis is a tick-borne parasitic disease that infects red blood cells and can have life-threatening complications. ET, a procedure sometimes used in severe cases, involves removing a patient's infected red blood cells and replacing them with healthy donor red blood cells. The study's results, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, have the potential to improve outcomes for patients with severe disease. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-severe-babesiosis-red-blood-cell.html Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:00:01 EDT news693834791 Older adults who develop delirium during a hospital admission face a substantially higher risk of dementia in later years, even if they had no prior health conditions, according to a major new population study appearing in The Lancet Healthy Longevity. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-hospital-delirium-linked-dementia-healthy.html Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:00:09 EDT news693745561 Efforts to address workplace violence against health care professionals need to evolve beyond preventing individual incidents to confronting systemic challenges that impede patient-centered, trauma-informed care, according to an article published in AACN Advanced Critical Care. Titled "Five Topics Overlooked in Workplace Violence Discussions in Health Care Settings," the study examines five underrecognized yet critical domains of inquiry that form the basis for practice and cultural changes in workplace violence prevention (WVP) on non-psychiatric units. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-workplace-violence-health-requires-paradigm.html Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:40:01 EDT news693652843