Is there still a trend toward substituting ambulatory for inpatient care?
Health care today is delivered predominantly in ambulatory settings. The most common ambulatory care setting is the physician’s office, with hospital outpatient clinics and emergency departments each accounting for about 10 percent of all ambulatory care visits. One of the most striking trends in health care over the past half century has been the development of ambulatory alternatives to care that previously would have been offered only in the inpatient setting. An interesting example of this substitution of ambulatory for inpatient care is the explosion in ambulatory surgery since the 1970s. As shown in the table below, the percentage of outpatient surgery at U.S. registered community hospitals has grown steadily until reaching a plateau in this decade. Today, two-thirds of all surgical procedures performed at U.S. registered community hospitals are done on an outpatient basis. Moreover, the total number of outpatient surgical procedures is even greater than shown in the table, which
Related Questions
- Should emergency room services be considered inpatient or outpatient (ambulatory) services, for purposes of determining whether the training "setting type" is ambulatory or inpatient?
- Is the file format for Inpatient data different than the Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery data format?
- Is the file format for Inpatient different than the Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery data format?
