HDU vs Regular Hospitalization

What is the functional difference between HDU and regular hospitalization? How come I cannot manually transfer pts between the two? (My HDUs often fill before the regular wards, and then it's difficult to take in pts from clinic / ED).

HDU has life monitor on the side of the bed opposite the bedside table. You could convert some normal wards to HDU wards by adding the life monitors and changing the room definitions.

HDU is for patients that are at risk.
Functionally in the game right now there's no difference. Ideally, HDU patients would get priority over normal patients.

Thanks for both of your replies. cTrix, I was pretty sure the mechanic in the game was no different between the two. Thank you for confirming. Is it a bug that my patients often end up in HDU and the option to move them to Regular is greyed out? ...Most of the pts in my Cardiology HDU, for example, have been stable a while and are just waiting for their hospitalization to end...

I dont fully know how the game decides patients require HDU but it's not a bug. HDU is for stable but risk patients. Patients at risk of collapse should be in ICU
HDU means High Dependency Unit. So any patient who can't walk on their own automatically qualifies. Patients that require repeated supervision, like post surgery patients, also qualify automatically. Realistically, a doctor would make a case by case distinction on which patients should be put in HDU, and I'm not a doctor.

Realistically, when nurses do  their check up rounds, they should be visiting HDU twice as frequently as regular. HDU patients should have close proximity to doctors and Diagnostic Unit rooms, and should be fast tracked for surgery.
Regular Ward patients can be left to their own devices without their condition getting any worse. I had one patient in internal medicine who required surgery to get a fungus infection scraped out of his lungs who was in regular. But I also kept getting Emergency cases that required surgery. So I ended up delaying that regular patients surgery for 2 days before operating him. He was fine, but I dont think I could've delayed him much longer.

Understood. And trust that I do know how it is supposed to work, but I don't see where the game fully obeys the dynamic that typically plays out between ICU and HDU / Regular wards, especially with respect to how patients are checked and prioritized for procedures like surgery. Is this something these guys are working on tweaking?

Also, I notice you're very active on the forum. Are you part of the dev team? An enthusiastic player?