Case-mix differences between hospital outpatient departments and private practice.

The belief that patients seen in hospital outpatient departments are sicker than those patients seen by private practice physicians is examined in this article. A large scale data set developed by Robert Mendenhall at the University of Southern California and modeled on the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) is used for secondary analysis. Differences in case-mix complexity were found to be slight, using two separate techniques.