It’s a confusing situation for patients and a financially necessary one for hospitals: If a hospital cannot decide whether a patient is appropriate for inpatient admission, the patient can be kept up ...

A Senate bill introduced Wednesday would count days spent under ‘observation status’ in a hospital toward Medicare’s three-day qualifying stay requirement. The Improving Access to Medicare Coverage ...

Improving practices surrounding outpatient observation by creating dedicated observation units with defined protocols could improve bed capacity and quality of care, according to an article in Health ...

Medicare patients initially admitted to hospitals as inpatients but later reclassified as outpatients under observation would finally have a process to appeal those decisions, thanks to a long-awaited ...