Patterns of Ophthalmology Transfers and Consultations at Academic Medical Centers in the United States

To characterize trends in ophthalmology transfer requests and inpatient and emergency department (ED) consultations at US academic medical centers.

Design and sites: Multicenter retrospective cohort study of 10 academic institutions, using transfer data from 2013–2024 and consultation data from 2014–2024.
Measures: Researchers counted requested and accepted ophthalmology transfers and inpatient and ED consultations, accounting for duplicate notes and overlapping transfers and consultations.
Analysis: Annual trends were assessed with ordinary least squares regression, adjusted for state population and hospital volumes; false discovery rate correction and autocorrelation-robust standard errors were used where indicated.

The provided context describes the study rationale and methods but does not include results, so trends and findings cannot be summarized.

Diagnoses, procedures, and referring institution or practitioner characteristics were not consistently available and were not collected.
State population was used as an indirect proxy for hospital catchment populations.
At one site, inpatient consultation counts could not be reliably separated from total consultations.
Participating institutions were required to have hospital call covered primarily by resident physicians throughout the data-collection period.