Inpatient vs. Outpatient

Two terms you may hear in discussions of electronic health record data are “inpatient” and “outpatient.” From a computational perspective, these terms are useful to know since they can suggest certain characteristics of the data.

The Definitions

• Inpatient: “in” the hospital
• Outpatient: “out” of the hospital (e.g. family medicine clinic, pediatrics clinic, ambulatory…