Hospital follow-ups are appointments to check on your recovery after you leave the hospital. Most people have hospital follow-ups after surgery, but there are other reasons for hospital stays, including heart attacks, strokes, severe asthma attacks, or other medical crises.
Just like your pre-op clearance before surgery, follow-up care focuses on your overall health and minimizing any problems associated with surgery.
At Washington Internal Medicine, hospital follow-ups involve a careful evaluation of your health with a particular focus on recovery from the condition that sent you to the hospital. They include:
One of the main goals of a hospital follow-up is to keep you from making a return trip to the hospital. Therefore, a great deal of this appointment deals with preventive care strategies that can improve your health now and in the future.
To this end, your provider may recommend some life changes, such as losing extra weight, improving your nutrition, exercising more often, or focusing on chronic disease management.
You also need to know the red flags that could indicate difficulty healing or post-surgical complications, the symptoms to watch for as you recover, and when to reach out for help.
Washington Internal Medicine offers care for acute illnesses, including complications after hospital release such as infections.
In general, you should schedule a hospital follow-up within 7-14 days of leaving the hospital. A follow-up within this time period significantly reduces your risk of hospital readmission.
About half of people who return to the hospital within a month of their discharge didn’t have a hospital follow-up after their original hospital stay.
You potentially could avoid another lengthy, costly, and inconvenient hospital stay by simply scheduling a hospital follow-up and working with Washington Internal Medicine to minimize the risk of complications.
If you have a hospital stay for any reason, a pre-op clearance and a hospital follow-up can both be vitally important tools in maximizing your recovery. Book your hospital follow-up online or call Washington Internal Medicine to schedule your in-office or telehealth appointment today.
At present we are open from Monday-Friday 8 AM – 5 PM. Our office is closed for lunch from 12 pm to 1 pm. We are also closed on weekends. We try to be flexible with appointments. Please call our office to see the available appointment date and times. We may be closed in observation of major holidays so please call our office to check if we are open on specific holidays.
To request an appointment you may call our office during business hours for available appointment time. You may also request an appointment from our website Request Appointment button. If you are a ZocDoc user, you can use the Book Appointment button or use ZocDoc app to book your appointment with our practice.
We accept all major commercial and government insurance including Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare Select. Please click here to see all the insurances currently accepted by the practice. You may call our office at (703) 436-9969 if you have further questions or concerns about your insurance and our payment policy. If you do not have insurance we can still see you.
