The investigation, led by M. Fuad Azrak, MD, gastrointestinal fellow at Emory and guest researcher for the CDC, sought to determine whether safety outcomes were comparable between hospitals and ASCs. The researchers studied a random sample of Medicare beneficiaries who underwent outpatient colonoscopies between 1992 and 2007 and randomly selected 174,000 individuals for study.
The researchers identified all individuals who visited the emergency room or were admitted to the hospital with a complication within 30 days of the colonoscopy. They evaluated the risk by comparing complications between hospitals and ASCs, adjusting for factors that could have influenced the comparison, including age, race, sex, disease, geographic region, physician specialty and polyp removal.
Before adjusting for other factors, the researchers found that ASCs were safer. After adjusting for compounding factors, the risk of complication between both settings was comparable.
Related Articles on Colonoscopies:
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Racial Disparities Persist in Colorectal Screening Under Medicare
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