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.