Healthcare Professionals

Committed to helping you meet the evolving challenges and opportunities in patient care.

Healthcare Professionals

  • Providing innovative therapies and technologies to help you treat patients with life-threatening illnesses in the ICU.

  • From the pharmacy to the bedside, we help you maximize safety, streamline processes and build cost efficiency throughout the hospital.

  • Acute and chronic nutritional care for your patients who are unable to get adequate nutrients orally or enterally.

  • Pioneering innovation in hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis to help you achieve better outcomes for your patients.

  • Delivering innovative surgical products that help you operate with confidence, precision and speed.

  • Our Products

    Our portfolio of acute, nutritional, renal, hospital and surgical care products helps advance healthcare around the world.

Perspectives

For more than 85-years, we have worked at the intersection of saving and sustaining lives.

Perspectives

Our Story

Our more than 85-year heritage gives us distinct perspective on the needs of patients and caregivers. We lead today by putting those insights to work to deliver new, better healthcare solutions and access to care in the communities where we live and work.

Our Story
  • Our Governance

    We are proud of our strong commitment to maintaining the highest standards of corporate governance.

  • Fueling Collaborative Innovation

    Nurturing a culture of innovation is critical to delivering on our mission to save and sustain lives. We partner with the healthcare community to continually find more efficient, smarter ways to help solve the world's most pressing healthcare challenges.

  • Corporate Responsibility

    We are committed to doing business the right way, ensuring that we champion our employees, our communities, our customers and patients, and our environment in everything we do.

  • Inclusion & Diversity

    We are committed to attracting, motivating and retaining an inclusive and diverse workforce.

  • Our History

    For more than 85 years, we’ve been focused on saving and sustaining lives and elevating patient care.

Patients

Helping you reach a healthy life, full of possibility.

Patients
  • Critical Care

    When every moment counts, our therapies help healthcare specialists provide life-sustaining treatment to you or your loved one.

  • Hospital Care

    From the pharmacy to the bedside, we support you and your healthcare providers with IV medications and infusion technologies designed with safety in mind.

  • When medical conditions prevent you from adequately feeding yourself, we provide life-saving clinical nutrition options to help you regain or maintain your health.

  • Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is an ongoing journey. While every journey is unique, Baxter is with you every step of the way, providing options to meet your lifestyle needs.

  • Surgical Care

    We partner with surgical teams around the world so they can operate with confidence, precision and speed for a successful outcome to your surgery.

Recognizing Disease-Related Malnutrition and its Effects on Patient Outcomes

By: Paul Wischmeyer, M.D., E.D.I.C., Department of Anesthesiology and Duke Clinical Research Institute, Duke University Medical Center

I have a unique perspective on disease-related malnutrition in hospitals, because I am both a physician and an intensive care unit (ICU) survivor who has been in and out of hospitals with inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis since the age of 15. I know what patients experience when deprived of nutrition during a hospital stay, which for many seriously ill U.S. patients can be as long as seven days. It’s these experiences that have fueled my passion to help physicians understand how assessing and treating at-risk patients with appropriate nutrition therapy improve their chances of recovery.

Until recently, we didn’t know the full consequences of disease-related malnutrition. We now know malnutrition can increase hospital stays by two-times, increase risk of mortality by up to five-times1 and increase hospital readmissions within 30 days of discharge by 54 percent2.

Healthcare providers have several nutrition care options to choose from – oral (food), enteral (tube-feeding) and parenteral (intravenous). In some cases, a combination of therapies is the best option to ensure the patient gets the appropriate amount of calories, proteins, vitamins, micronutrients and trace elements.

What needs to happen to ensure better nutritional care in the hospital?

  • Education – We have to engrain in our healthcare providers during clinical training that evaluating nutrition status is as important as evaluating vital signs.
  • Screening – I teach physicians that every patient’s nutritional needs must be assessed when they arrive at the hospital; the dietitian is their best friend; and at-risk patients should start nutritional care within 24-48 hours of their stay.
  • Treatment – When oral or enteral nutrition are not appropriate or are insufficient, we know patients need parenteral nutrition. And, a patient’s family should feel empowered to talk with their loved one’s healthcare team to ensure nutritional needs are being met daily.

To support better outcomes for our patients, we need to ensure healthcare providers are better educated about malnutrition screening and the safety and value of nutrition care options.