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Transferred emergency general surgery (EGS) patients constitute a highly vulnerable, acutely ill population. Guidelines to facilitate timely, appropriate EGS transfers are lacking. We determined patient- and hospital-level factors associated with interhospital EGS transfers, a critical first step to identifying which patients may require transfer.

Adult EGS patients (defined by American Association for the Surgery of Trauma International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision diagnosis codes) were identified within the 2008-2013 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (n = 17,175,450). Patient- and hospital-level factors were examined as predictors of transfer to another acute care hospital with a multivariate proportional cause-specific hazards model with a competing risk analysis to assess the effect of risk factors for transfer.

1.8% of encounters resulted in a transfer (n = 318,286). Transferred patients …