Older patients tend to fare better with female doctors, study shows
A new study could add to the argument over equal pay in the ranks of medicine: Older patients treated by female doctors tend to do better than those treated by males.
Public health researchers at Harvard found that elderly patients were less likely to die or be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days if treated by female doctors rather than male. The study doesn’t explain why this happens, but prior studies have found that female doctors tend to spend more time with patients, communicate better, and follow clinical guidelines more often than their male colleagues.
The findings not only launch a grenade at the gender pay gap in medicine, they also suggest the methods of female physicians — if replicated broadly — could significantly improve the quality of medical care in the United States.
“We need to understand why these differences exist … and figure out how to translate it to the broader population of physicians,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and senior author of the paper.
The study, which examined data from more than 1 million Medicare beneficiaries, said that if male doctors achieved the same outcomes as female doctors, annual deaths of Medicare patients alone would drop by 32,000. That’s comparable to the number of annual deaths from car accidents in the US.
Meanwhile, female physicians are still paid considerably less than males, according to recent research. A paper published this year in JAMA Internal Medicine found that male academic physicians get an average of 8 percent more than females, regardless of specialty, years of experience or productivity, which translates to an average salary bump of about $20,000, although the extent of the disparity varies widely.
Jha said he hopes the study will spur constructive conversation. The wage gap “is particularly unconscionable given the performance of women in terms of providing high quality care,” he said.
Harvard’s study found that, when treated by female internists, Medicare patients had a 4 percent lower relative risk of dying prematurely and 5 percent lower risk of being readmitted to a hospital within 30 days. Researchers examined outcome data between 2011 and 2014 on the eight most common conditions in seniors treated by general internists, including sepsis, pneumonia, congestive heart failure, and acute renal failure.
Patients of female physicians had lower rates of mortality and readmission in all of the conditions examined, although the difference was not always statistically significant. Sepsis is a leading killer of elderly patients and costs more than $20 billion a year to treat. It killed about 182,000 people in the United States in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which launched a national campaign this year to improve treatment of the condition.
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Maybe it's the "Mother" in their genetic makeup that makes the difference.
Maybe it's the "Mother" in their genetic makeup that makes the difference.
Just as a general rule of thumb, I've often found that women tend to be a bit more empathetic, patient and detailed orientated than men.
A little more time spent, a little more attention paid, might also be factors in the results found in the study.
I agree AH. I also think male physicians are uncomfortable getting to know their patients or the patients are uncomfortable talking to male doctors. Perception may play a part here. Women = mother = nurturer.
Oh I love this one, my HMO just caused me to change physicians, (had a dickens of a time trying to find one, it took two months) the new one is female. (and a great one I think, good looking to boot)
Thank god that happened, I get to live longer, Harvard proved it. {chuckle}