Inpatient visits < 1 day possible?

Implementers
1

Hi,

I have data from hospital which has visit type as “Inpatient” and visit category as “Day Surgery”, “Endoscopy”.

But all the visits get over within one day or in few hours.

Do you think it would be appropriate to treat all Day Surgery visits as “Outpatient” visits as they get in and leave the same day?

Or do we have to still retain them as “Inpatient”? Or there can be inpatient visits even with few hours?

2

We met such cases in some hoslitalization related projects. Usually we treat these patients as special inpatients category. If not appropriate for the analytic objective, we would give such patients a LOS=half day or avg( all patients hours in hospitals). They are inpatients, can’t be treated as outpatients in financial perspective either.

3

This a very good question coming from thorough analysis of your source data. These are “Outpatient” visits. Sometimes the EHR or hospital “admits” the Person to the hospital for a surgery or other Procedure and then the Person leaves later the same day.

From the OMOP perspective, all visits less than one day are Outpatient Visits regardless of the label a hospital gives the visit.

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4

Just as an addition to Melanie’s thoughtful comment, it may be a little tricky with ‘Emergency room and inpatient visit’, which can qualify as IP. But similarly to what she said, we usually distinguish them based on duration. If less than a day - not inpatient.

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