Few Anesthesia-Related Adverse Events in a Retrospective Cohort Study of Patients With Unanticipated Intensive Care Unit Admission After Ambulatory Procedures

We evaluated whether a hospital-based anesthesia department can validly use automated intensive care unit (ICU) admission data after elective ambulatory procedures to assess the quality of anesthetic care. Among 13,656 patients, 25 (0.2%) had an unplanned hospital length of stay >1 night and ICU admission. On review, only 1 of the 25 cases (0.007%) had an anesthesia-related complication. The false-positive incidence of anesthetic complications was >= 96% for scheduled ambulatory cases with ICU admission. Therefore, fully automated computerized identification of all unexpected ICU admissions after ambulatory procedures without manual review is an unsuitable (invalid) metric of individual anesthesiologists' clinical performance.