Ambulatory Care Visits to Physician Offices, Hospital Outpatient Departments, and Emergency Departments: United States, 1996

The National Center for Health Statistics has recently released a report that describes ambulatory care visits in the United States across three ambulatory care settings--physician offices, hospital outpatient departments, and hospital emergency departments. This report is titled "Ambulatory Care Visits to Physician Offices, Hospital Outpatient Departments, and Emergency Departments: United States, 1996." Statistics are based on data collected from a national sample of office-based physicians and the outpatient and emergency departments of non-Federal, general and short-stay hospitals in the United States. Ambulatory medical care services are described in terms of patient and visit characteristics overall, and across the various types of medical care settings. The data presented in this report were collected by the 1996 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the 1996 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

Data Highlights:
During 1996 an estimated 892.0 million visits were made to physicians offices, hospital outpatient departments, and hospital emergency departments in the United States, which represents an overall rate of 3.4 visits per person.
Visits to office-based physicians accounted for 82.3 percent of ambulatory care utilization, followed by visits to emergency departments (10.1 percent), and outpatient departments (7.5 percent).
Persons 75 years of age and over had the highest rate of ambulatory care visits.
There were an estimate of 129.3 million injury-related ambulatory care visits during 1996, or 48.9 visits per 100 persons.

Keywords: ambulatory care visits, diagnoses, injury, ICD-9-CM

This page last reviewed January 11, 2007