Abstract 16821: Impact of Patient Transfers on Outcome Evaluations Following Acute Myocardial Infarction

Introduction: Patients hospitalized for an AMI are commonly transferred to tertiary care facilities to receive advanced procedures. In the United States, transferred patients are often excluded from outcome evaluations due to limitations in ascertaining outcomes. In Canada, centralized administrative and clinical databases allow for linkage of outcomes across institutions. This study evaluated the influence of excluding transferred AMI patients on estimates of age and sex-specific 30-day mortality rates over a 10-year period. Methods: All incident AMI hospitalizations (ICD-9: 410 and ICD-10: I21, I22) to acute care hospitals in British Columbia from 2000 to 2009 were identified through the Discharge Abstract Database and linked to mortality through the Vital Statistics registry. A transfer was identified as a discharge from the index AMI admission hospital to another hospital. Thirty-day mortality was defined as any death within 30 days of the index hospitalization. A logistic regression model was used to...