Ambulatory Surgery in the United States, 1996

Advance Data 300. Ambulatory surgery has increased in the United States since the early 1980's. Two major reasons for the increase are advances in medical technology and cost containment initiatives. This report, "Ambulatory Surgery in the United States, 1996," presents estimates of surgical and nonsurgical procedures performed on an ambulatory basis in hospitals and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers in the United States. Data are presented by types of facilities, age, sex, and geographic region. Major categories of procedures and diagnoses are shown by age, sex, and region. The estimates are based on data collected from the 1996 National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. The 1996 data were abstracted from 125,000 medical records in 488 hospitals and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers.

Data Highlights:

An estimate of 17.5 visits (of the ambulatory surgery visits) occurred in hospitals and 3.3 million occurred in freestanding centers.

Females had more ambulatory surgery visits (11.7 million) than males (9.1 million).

In 1996 an estimate of 31.5 million surgical and nonsurgical procedures were performed during 20.8 million ambulatory surgery visits.

Four procedures were each performed more than a million times on ambulatory patients: extraction of lens (2,267,000); endoscopy of large intestine (1,913,000); insertion of prosthetic lens (1,816,000); and endoscopy of small intestine (1,563,000).

Keywords: National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery, procedures, diagnoses, outpatients

This page last reviewed January 11, 2007