Still, Jacobson said it wasn't the "final word." He said the researchers admitted they erred on the side of ascribing hospital visits to endoscopies if the cases were ambiguous.

"Some of these things are a little hard to be sure that it's accurate," he said, such as a patient falling a week after the procedure.

"Like they said, a day after, you could say, maybe it was an elderly person under the influence of sedation, but a week after, someone falls, I'm not sure that was appropriate," he said.

"If you take a lot of these other ones out, the overall complication rate drops a sizable amount," Jacobson added. "That said, if people are coming to the emergency room and we can even think it's related to the endoscopy, the question is what else can we do to prevent that from happening."

The results could suggest systemic problems - not necessarily with procedures, but with helping patients know when their problems are serious enough to warrant visiting the hospital, as only around of half of ER visits resulted in hospitalizations.

"[It] points to system changes in terms of what can we do to give patients a way of getting care without necessarily utilizing health care dollars," Jacobson said.

He said at his medical center, "We have nurses call the day after the procedure, and if there [are] any symptoms or anything, we call patients directly. And that may be one way of heading off some emergency room visits for things that may not be a complication."

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