Integrative Medicine: An Opportunity for Improving Quality of Care in the Inpatient Setting

As medicine shifts to a value-based focus, health care providers in inpatient settings are actively seeking approaches to providing high-quality patient care without exacerbating prevailing cost burden. Complementary and integrative medicine may offer one potential solution for this challenge. Although the benefits of utilizing integrative practices in the inpatient setting have not been explored extensively thus far, early evidence demonstrates great promise of using integrative modalities to improve symptom burden in the inpatient setting while increasing patient pain satisfaction and reducing overall costs of care. Currently, social, educational, and financial barriers exist, limiting the widespread incorporation of complementary and integrative medicine into the inpatient setting. Nonetheless, a more robust body of literature demonstrating the effectiveness of complementary and integrative medicine in reducing costs of care and improving patient outcomes may help address these limitations and lead to the acceptance of integrative practices as the standard of high-value inpatient care.