Out-of-Hospital Transfers: When the Intention is not to Cure

Our published single-center cohort study determined the outcomes of out-of-hospital transfer of cancer patients to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at MD Anderson Cancer Center [1]. In this three year study 228 patients were transferred for further care to our ICU from outside hospitals all over the country. Surprisingly, and contrary to what was reported in the literature, we observed that transferring critically ill oncological patients to a specialized center did not lead to worse outcomes or increased resource utilization [1].