Outcomes of ventilated patients with sepsis who undergo inter- hospital transfer: a nationwide linked analysis Barret Rush, MD MPH 1,2,3 , Patrick D Tyler, MD 4 , David J Stone, MD 5 , Benjamin P Geisler, MD MPH 6 , Keith R Walley, MD 1,3 , and Leo Anthony Celi, MD MPH MS 7,8 Barret Rush: bar890@mail.harvard.edu; Patrick D Tyler: pdtyler@bidmc.harvard.edu; David J Stone: djs4v@virginia.edu; Benjamin P Geisler: bgeisler@post.harvard.edu; Keith R Walley: Keith.Walley@hli.ubc.ca; Leo Anthony Celi: lceli@bidmc.harvard.edu 1 Division of Critical Care Medicine, St. Paul's Hospital, University of British Columbia, 1081 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6, Canada 2 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115 3 Centre for Heart Lung Innovation (HLI), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada 4 Department of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA 5 Departments of Anesthesiology and Neurosurgery, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA 6 Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit St, Boston MA 02114 7 Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA 8 Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Abstract Objectives—The outcomes of critically ill patients who undergo inter-hospital transfer (IHT) are not well understood. Physicians assume that patients who undergo IHT will receive more advanced care that may translate into decreased morbidity or mortality relative to a similar patient who is not transferred. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this assumption. We examined country-level U.S. data from the Nationwide Readmissions Database to examine whether, in mechanically ventilated (MV) patients with sepsis, IHT is associated with a mortality benefit. Send Correspondence to: Patrick D Tyler MD, Department of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Rosenberg Building, One Deaconess Road, 2nd Floor, Boston, MA 02215, pdtyler@bidmc.harvard.edu. Financial Disclosures: No financial disclosures Conflict of Interest: No authors have any conflicts of interest to disclose The remaining authors have disclosed that they do not have any potential conflicts of interest. Author Contributions: Conception and design: PDT, BR, LAC Statistics: BR Interpretation: all authors Drafting the manuscript for important intellectual content: all authors HHS Public Access Author manuscript Crit Care Med. Author manuscript. Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript