Hospital Patients are More Complicated Than Ever: What It Means for Medicine

Let’s face it. The practice of Medicine is just harder now.

The first time I saw a patient in the hospital was in 2004, twenty years ago, when I was a third-year med student.

Since that time, I have spent countless hours in the hospital as a resident, a renal fellow, and finally as an attending. And I’m sure many of you in the medical community feel the same thing I do — which is that patients are much more complicated now than they used to be. I’ll listen to an intern present a new case on rounds and she’ll have an assessment and plan that encompasses a dozen individual medical problems. Sometimes, I have to literally be like — wait, why is this patient here again?

But until now I had no data to convince myself that this feeling was real — that hospitalized patients are getting more and more complicated, or that they only seem more complicated because I’m getting older. Maybe I was better able to keep track of things when I was an intern rather than now as an attending, spending just a couple months of the year in the hospital. I mean, after all, if patients were getting more complicated, surely hospitals would know this and allocate more resources to patient care, right?