Objectives: This study collected national inpatient data to investigate the impact of hospital specialty and size on patient outcomes following mandibular distraction osteogenesis (MDO).
Design: Kids' Inpatient Database was used to identify patients less than 12 months of age with Pierre Robin sequence (PRS) who underwent MDO in one of the following years: 2006, 2009, and 2012.
Setting: Inpatient database from the United States.
Participants: Two hundred seventy-six patients with PRS underwent MDO with 134 (48.6%) identified as nonsyndromic and 142 (51.4%) as syndromic.
Interventions: Mandibular distraction osteogenesis.
Main outcome measures: Length of hospital stay, adjunct airway and nutritional interventions and disposition.
Results: The average length of stay was 24 and 30 days for patients with nonsyndromic and syndromic PRS, respectively (P = .066). Patients with a syndromic as compared to nonsyndromic diagnosis had a higher incidence of gastrostomy tube placement (21.8 vs 12.7%, P = .045). Univariate analysis showed that a lower proportion of patients at children's hospitals as compared to non-children's hospitals necessitated 1 or more airway or nutrition-related intervention (19/148 [12.8%] vs 31/127 [24.4%]; P = .012) and had a lower incidence of a nonroutine discharge (transfer or patient death; 7.4% vs 40.0% nonroutine; P < .001). Multivariable analysis additionally revealed that patients at children's hospitals were less likely to discharge nonroutine (OR = 0.07, 95% CI: 0.02-0.32).
Conclusions: Results from this national cohort demonstrated that at children-specific hospitals patients with PRS were less likely to require additional airway and nutritional procedures and more likely to discharge to home.
Keywords: Pierre Robin sequence; hospital characteristics; mandibular distraction osteogenesis.