Depending on the situation, it's necessary to check the status of the patient every hour or so. If a condition carries e.g. an increased risk of stroke, there is no way to check for it except asking the patient to move and talk. A good night of sleep is valuable, but if you wake up with a severe paralysis and after the time window that allows e.g. removal of a clot, it's been too high a price for a few nights of good sleep

Sure, the tests I get. It was the briefings that seem weird to not cluster.

In the case of a pregnancy, I'm assuming these "briefings" are things like trying to teach the new parent things they'll need to know when they go home; or giving them status updates about tests done on their new baby if they're in the NICU, and so forth. These all seem like things that could wait.

Is the point to use the infodumping as an excuse to do the tests?

They usually do. While it could be the case the hospital is just poorly managed, it's hard to say without knowing the specifics of each case. I don't know what all those "briefings" were about but there could have been medical reasons for tests every 90 minutes.

Honestly, the truth is hospitals are designed to do this. The entire purpose of the place is to have people moved into it so that these constant checks and examinations as well as treatments can be done most efficiently. The idea is to rapidly notice and react to changes in the patient's condition.

In programming terms, the core function of a hospital is to poll and update the patient's state in a loop that runs while consent is given and until cured or dead. The polling frequency is calibrated according to knowledge of the patient's general condition and the specific pathology being treated.

If you know the patient could bleed out and die after some surgical procedure, you want to check periodically that this is not happening. How frequently do you check? Depends on what you predict could happen. If you think the worst that could happen is a small and slow bleeding, then you can check less often. If you think there's risk of major bleeding, then you want to check frequently, possibly even constantly.

Clustering is a big goal for hospitals, since it's also easier for the nurses, but a lot of factors can interrupt that. Coordinating different people to do different tasks, getting the requisite lab results or medication approvals on time, ad-hoc requests from the patient/patient family themselves, a need to quickly double check what the monitors on the patient are saying in case something is going wrong, etc.