Inpatient versus Outpatient Alveolar Bone Grafting: A Nationwide Cost Analysis.

Objective: To compare postoperative outcomes and costs between inpatient and outpatient ABG in the United States.

Design: Retrospective cohort.

Setting: Multi-institutional/national.

Patients and participants: Patients who underwent ABG (n = 6649) were identified in the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program Pediatric database from 2012-2021. Inpatient and outpatient cohorts were matched using coarsened exact matching.

Main outcomes measure(s): Thirty-day readmission, reoperation, and complications. A modified Markov model was developed to estimate the cost difference between cohorts. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were performed.

Results: After matching, 3718 patients were included, of which 1859 patients were in each hospital-setting cohort. The inpatient cohort had significantly higher rates of reoperations (0.6% vs. 0.2%; p = 0.032) and surgical site infections (0.8% vs. 0.2%; p = 0.018). The total cost of outpatient ABG was estimated to be $10,824 vs. $20,955 for inpatient ABG, resulting in $10,131 cost savings per patient. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis revealed that all 10,000 simulations resulted in consistent cost savings for the outpatient cohort that ranged from $8000 to $24,000.

Conclusions: Outpatient ABG has become increasingly more popular over the past ten years, with a majority of cases being performed in the ambulatory setting. If deemed safe for the individual patient, outpatient ABG may confer a lower risk of nosocomial complications and offer significant cost savings to the healthcare economy.