Advancing the Evidence Base in the Care of Term and Late Preterm Infants.

In 2019, there were ∼3.7 million births registered in the United States, of which 89.8% were delivered at ≥37 weeks’ gestation (term) and 7.5% were delivered between 34 and 36 weeks’ gestation (late preterm).1 The vast majority of births in the United States occur in the hospital (98.64% in 2012),2 and most otherwise healthy term infants and late preterm infants (LPIs) are cared for in maternity and well-newborn units. Clinicians managing the care of neonates admitted to the well-newborn unit are pediatric hospitalists, general pediatricians, neonatologists, and advance practice providers. Their scope of practice includes well-newborn care, management of common newborn concerns, and providing anticipatory guidance to parents.3 For pediatric hospitalists choosing subspecialty certification in pediatric hospital medicine, competency in newborn care is expected.4 The term “newborn hospitalist” can include clinicians practicing primarily in the NICU, but for the purposes of this commentary, our focus is on the care of term infants and LPIs on maternity and well-newborn units and, in some cases, on the pediatric wards. Term infants and LPIs make up a large proportion of the hospital volume, and major advancements in areas such as the management of sepsis and neonatal weight loss have occurred over the last decade.5,6 However, the evidence base for the care of term infants and LPIs has many gaps, and this month’s Hospital Pediatrics newborn issue sheds light on some topics that newborn hospitalists grapple with. An area of newborn hospital medicine that has received much attention in the past several years is the care of infants with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS). In 2017, there were 7.3 infants with NOWS per …