It is 9:14 in the morning. You have seen six of your twenty-two patients. Your pager has gone off four times. Room 8 has a new troponin trending up. Room 14 has a potassium of 6.1 with a wide QRS on the monitor. The intern is waiting outside room 19 because the family wants to talk. And the attending from the last shift left a note that the discharge in room 3 “should have gone yesterday.”
At this moment, you do not need a textbook. You do not need a lecture. You do not need to open a browser and wait for a loading screen.
You need the answer. Right now. In your hand.
The Hospital Medicine Playbook was designed for exactly this moment. Every section, every table, every algorithm in this book was built around one question: what does a hospitalist actually need at the bedside, right now, under pressure?
Not what they might want to read on a quiet afternoon. What they need when the floor is full, the pager is hot, and there is no time to be wrong.
Most references fall into two categories. The first is the comprehensive textbook; thorough, authoritative, and completely useless when you are standing outside a patient’s room with thirty seconds to make a decision. The second is the pocket card; fast but shallow, outdated the moment it is printed, and absent the clinical reasoning that tells you why you are doing what you are doing.
Neither is what you actually reach for. This book is.
This Edition reflects the guidelines as they stand in 2026 including the 2026 AHA/ASA stroke guideline making tenecteplase a Class 1 agent, the 2025 ACC/AHA unified ACS guideline, GOLD 2025, the 2024 ADA/EASD hyperglycemic crises consensus, and the October 2024 multisociety reversal on GLP-1 perioperative management. Every updated section carries a superscript citation to its source in the References chapter.

*Clinical decision support only. Does not replace primary clinical practice guidelines, institutional protocols, pharmacist input, or individual clinical judgment. Verify all doses and recommendations for each patient. Guidelines change; consult the original sources and current references before applying any recommendation.