I'm not from the US and had to look up "inpatient" and "outpatient", so to share what I've found: as I understand it it's different ways of recording what a pat

I'm not from the US and had to look up "inpatient" and "outpatient", so to share what I've found: as I understand it it's different ways of recording what a patient is suffering from, with "inpatient" being used when a cause is known, and "outpatient" when a doctor can only describe the symptoms, without knowing what they are caused by. And I guess the relevance is that discerning and switching between the two when a better diagnosis is made causes large administrative overhead?