https://medicalxpress.com/hospital-medicine-news/ en-us Latest medical news and research in Hospital medicine At least 12% of Americans now communicate with their health care providers about appointments, test results and ongoing treatments via secure online patient portals and health apps, a new study shows. Meanwhile, traditional in-person visits to the doctor's office have rebounded since the pandemic. Although digital medicine has become a routine part of health care, it is supplementing rather than replacing in-person care. This evolution, researchers say, is reshaping how hospitals and clinics operate daily. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-digital-health-tools-reshaping-states.html Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:00:01 EDT news701017202 Two independent AI models that can assist with multiple stages of patient management, from diagnosis to treatment decisions, are presented in Nature this week. The systems—MIRA (Medical Intelligence for Reasoning and Action) and Google's AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer)—perform at least as well as physicians, demonstrating the potential for conversational AI tools to help with disease management. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-medical-ais-diagnosis-treatment-decisions.html Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:20:10 EDT news700999727 Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine found caregivers of children hospitalized for cancer and blood disorders may experience food insecurity during their child's stay, even if they don't face that issue at home, and it could be linked to longer stays. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-caregivers-children-hospitalized-cancer-blood.html Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:20:01 EDT news700992722 Helping hospitalized patients begin treatment for opioid use disorder may improve outcomes at a reasonable financial cost, according to a study co-led by investigators at Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University. The analysis, published in JAMA Network Open, suggests the hospital-based addiction consultation service known as START (Substance Use Treatment and Recovery Team) is cost-effective and clinically effective, based on findings from a prior randomized trial. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-hospital-addiction-outcomes.html Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:40:01 EDT news700730521 Remote monitoring isn't a panacea for reducing readmissions across all conditions—and for some patients, clinicians should proceed with caution, clinical trial results published in JAMA Network Open suggest. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-remote-readmissions-sepsis-trial.html Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:30:01 EDT news700302841 Every day, across thousands of American hospitals, artificial intelligence quietly shapes decisions that determine patient outcomes. An algorithm flags a patient as high risk for sepsis; a risk score informs whether a woman receives additional cancer screening; a deterioration model triggers an alert that sends a care team to a bedside. These tools are embedded in the workflows of nearly two-thirds of U.S. hospitals, integrated into the electronic health record systems clinicians rely on daily. But many have never been reviewed by the FDA. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-ai-tools-patient-regulatory-oversight.html Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:00:03 EDT news700327261 About a year ago at Erlanger Baroness, the largest hospital in Chattanooga, anesthesia staff noticed that a nurse was slurring his words and struggling to stay awake while on duty in the surgery center, according to a Tennessee Board of Nursing consent order. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-tennessee-hospital-nurse-stole-fentanyl.html Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:20:01 EDT news700212720 The hospital discharge summary—a document that outlines a patient's hospital stay for their outpatient providers—can take up a lot of doctors' time. It needs to comprehensively and succinctly summarize days, sometimes weeks, of medical details. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-ai-ease-burden-hospital-discharge.html Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:00:03 EDT news700242301 Just over a decade ago, Michigan expanded its Medicaid health coverage program, opening it to all adults with very low incomes through the Healthy Michigan Plan (HMP). https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-michigan-medicaid-expansion-uninsurance-debt.html Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:40:06 EDT news700232200 You go to the hospital for treatment and to get better. But sometimes, you get something much less welcome: an infection. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-teeth-hospital-chance-pneumonia.html Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:00:09 EDT news700225928 Dementia makes most things in life more difficult, including hospital care. Though often essential for patients with severe acute illness, hospital care can be confusing for persons with dementia (PWD). Compared with older adults without dementia, PWD in the United States visit the emergency room and are hospitalized at higher rates. In these cases, the decision on a hospital stay requires a delicate balance between the potential benefits and risks of hospital care. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-hospital-admission-affects-persons-dementia.html Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:00:04 EDT news700148630 A Concordia-led research team has developed a planning tool that could help hospitals book their operating rooms more efficiently, shorten wait times and better cope with last‑minute emergencies. The researchers developed their model using artificial intelligence tools to plan which operating rooms to open on each day, when each surgery should start and which cases may need to be delayed, all in a single, integrated framework. Their model uses far fewer variables than a widely used previous approach, making it faster and more practical for real hospital conditions, especially when dealing with dozens or even hundreds of operations in a week. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-tool-hospitals-surgical.html Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:40:03 EDT news699805081 Virtual wards, also known as hospital at home, are increasingly being used across the NHS to support people who would otherwise need hospital care to receive treatment and monitoring at home. A new study led by University of Manchester researchers explored how safe care is delivered in virtual wards, highlighting the often unseen work carried out by patients and caregivers as they undertake key elements of risk-work previously held by clinicians. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-safety-nhs-virtual-wards.html Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:00:06 EDT news699698462 Telemedicine, continuous monitoring and remote procedures are becoming increasingly important in medicine. For these to operate seamlessly in everyday clinical practice, data must be transmitted quickly, reliably and without interruption. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and TUM University Hospital have investigated how future 6G networks can manage computing power and data transmission so that up to 40% more applications can be run simultaneously. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-6g-networks-network-telemedicine.html Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:20:04 EDT news699613885 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