AHRQ Study: Ambulatory ‘Revisits’ Occur Frequently, Often Due to Complications

Ambulatory “revisits”—the outpatient equivalent of hospital readmissions—occur frequently and are often associated with complications, a new AHRQ-funded study found. The study, published as a research letter in JAMA, used AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project to analyze data from more than 480,000 low- to moderate-risk ambulatory operations. Researchers found a rate of 95 all-cause revisits per 1,000 operations; most revisits were to emergency departments (59 per 1,000 operations) followed by inpatient surgery settings (27 per 1,000 operations). Across all operations and settings, two-thirds of the revisits (65 per 1,000) were for complications related to the procedure, with the remaining being attributed to unrelated conditions. The authors concluded that more detailed study is needed to understand the nature of these revisits and determine which complications may be preventable. Read the research letter.

Return to Acute Care Following Ambulatory Surgery

Claudia A. Steiner, MD, MPH1; Melinda Maggard-Gibbons, MD, MSHS2; Susan Oehme Raetzman, MSPH3; Marguerite L. Barrett, MS4; Greg D. Sacks, MD, MPH5; Pamela L. Owens, PhD1

[+] Author Affiliations

JAMA. 2015;314(13):1397-1399. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.12210.

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This population epidemiology study used data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project database to characterize rates of all-cause unplanned visits within 30 days of ambulatory surgery and the relationships between the cause for the revisit and the preceding operation.

Two-thirds of operations are performed on an outpatient basis, yet little research has assessed their quality.1- 4 Our population-based study found that 30-day revisits for clinically significant surgical site infections following ambulatory operations accounted for less than 15% of all-cause revisits to inpatient or ambulatory surgery settings.5