PURPOSE The cost implications associated with offloading outpatient surgery from hospitals to ambulatory surgery centers and the physician office remain poorly defined. Therefore, we determined whether payments for outpatient surgery vary by location of care. MATERIALS AND METHODS Using national Medicare claims from 1998 to 2006, we identified elderly patients who underwent 1 of 22 common out...

OBJECTIVES To compare postoperative complication rates after dissection tonsillectomy in patients operated by outpatient surgery and patients operated by inpatient surgery. POPULATION AND METHODS A prospective, single-centre, observational study was conducted over a period of 1 year. Dissection tonsillectomy was performed in 103 patients (mean age: 4 years) between September 2011 and Septembe...

In summary, regional techniques offer significant advantages in the outpatient setting. They can avoid the side effects of nausea, vomiting, and pain that frequently delay discharge or cause admission. They can also provide prolonged analgesia as well as offer, with the use of continuous catheters, the promise of a pain-free perioperative period. The choice of drugs must be carefully adjusted, ...

Regional anaesthesia is an ideal anaesthetic technique for many outpatient surgery procedures. With proper preparation, selection and planning, regional anaesthesia will provide excellent operating conditions for the surgeon and a very satisfactory anaesthetic state for the patient in a cost-effective way. Its minimum effect on major organ functions, intense sensory blockade, low potential for ...

of surgery has taken place with laparoscopic surgery in the late 1980s. Indeed, the linking of technologic development circumstances to the will of a number of surgeons to offer less damaging surgery led to the notion of “minimally aggressive surgery”, in which laparoscopic surgery is paradigmatic. Laparoscopic surgery entailed a number of nowadays universally accepted benefits for patients. In...

The practice of outpatient breast cancer surgery has been controversial in the United States. This study aimed to update time trends and geographic variation in outpatient breast cancer surgery among elderly Medicare fee-for-service women in the United States. Using the 1993-2002 linked Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER)-Medicare claims data and the Area Resource Files, we identi...

During the past thirty years outpatient surgery has become an increasingly important part of medical care in the United States. The number of outpatient procedures has risen dramatically since 1981, and the majority of surgeries performed in the United States now take place in outpatient settings. Using data on procedure length, we show that ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) provide a lower-cos...