Introduction: Clear and unambiguous understanding of the definition of the term «hospitalization» enshrined in regulatory legal acts is an important condition for improving the effectiveness and safety of medical activities, as it will reduce legal uncertainty, improve mutual understanding between participants in the provision of medical care, and consequently, enhance its quality. Research objective: To search for the definition of the term «hospitalization» in current regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation. Materials and methods. Three reference information and legal systems were used: Consultant+, Garant, KonturNormativ, as well as the official Internet portal of legal information pravo.gov.ru, which were used in the first stage to form a database of regulatory legal acts. In the second stage, the obtained documents were evaluated according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. In the third stage of the research, duplicate regulatory legal acts were excluded. In the final stage, the regulatory legal acts were analyzed for the presence of the definition of the term 'hospitalization'.» Results. A database of current regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation (330 unique documents) containing the semantic unit «hospitalization» in various forms has been formed. The semantic unit «hospitalization» in various variations, as well as such concepts as «non-profile hospitalization», «emergency hospitalization», «procedure for hospitalization», «involuntary hospitalization», etc., were used in all regulatory documents. At the same time, the results of the analysis have shown that the definition of the term «hospitalization» is absent in the current regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation. Conclusion. Systematized and ordered normative legal acts of the Russian Federation, containing the semantic unit «hospitalization» as a result of this study, can serve as a basis for a wide range of users in studying issues related to patient placement for treatment in a hospital setting. This study has shown that current normative acts, despite frequent use, do not provide a definition of the term «hospitalization».