Clinical Scorecard: Patterns of Ophthalmology Transfers and Consultations at Academic Medical Centers in the United States
At a Glance
Category
Detail
Condition
Interhospital ophthalmology transfers and ED/inpatient consultations
Key Mechanisms
The study characterizes transfer requests and ophthalmology consultations at academic medical centers amid concerns about community-hospital call coverage and academic-center workload.
Target Population
Transfer and consultation records from participating academic hospitals; consultation counts included patients transferred from outside facilities before consultation.
Care Setting
Participating academic hospitals: accepted ED and inpatient transfers and ED and inpatient consultations, collected over varying periods from 2013 to 2024.
Key Highlights
Multicenter retrospective cohort study of ophthalmology transfers and consultations at 10 academic institutions.
Transfer data covered 2013–2024; inpatient and emergency department consultation data covered 2014–2024.
The study tabulated yearly requested and accepted transfers and consultation counts, with measures normalized by state population and adjusted for hospital volume.
Transfers and consultations overlapped and were not mutually exclusive.
The supplied source excerpt describes the study rationale and methods but is truncated before the Results; results cannot be assessed from this excerpt.
Guideline-Based Recommendations
Diagnosis
Management
Monitoring & Follow-up
Risks
The article background states that diminished community-hospital ophthalmology coverage may be associated with delays in time-sensitive treatment and worse outcomes.
The authors describe rising consultation and call volumes at academic centers as pressure on clinical and training resources.
Patient & Prescribing Data
Consultation records for ED and inpatient patients, including patients transferred from outside facilities before consultation.
The source states that diagnoses, procedures, and characteristics of referring institutions or practitioners were not consistently available and were not collected; it does not report prescribing data.
Clinical Best Practices
Method: each patient receiving an ED or inpatient ophthalmology consultation was counted; multiple notes from one hospital encounter and notes entered under a nonophthalmology service were excluded.
Method: ED versus inpatient consultation was classified by the setting where the initial consultation note was authored.
Method: state population was used as an indirect proxy for regional population, and hospital-specific measures were used to account for institutional scale.
by Shu Feng, Karine D. Bojikian, Thellea K. Leveque, Jacquelyn O’Banion, Daniel B. Moore, Donna H. Kim, Andrew T. Melson, Samuel J. Prater, Ore-ofe Adesina, Daniel J. Ozzello, Jeremy Reitinger, Ayaka Fujihashi, Joseph Bogaard, Theresa M. Long, Manasvee S. Kapadia, Douglas J. Rhee, Leona Ding, Jennifer T. Yu
