Female Doctors More Likely to Keep their Medicare Patients Alive than Male Counterparts

LOS ANGELES, CA -- Male doctors may get paid considerably more than their female counterparts, but it’s the women who do a better job of keeping their Medicare patients alive, according to an exhaustive Harvard study published this week.

The report, which ran in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that Medicare patients treated by women had a 11.07 percent mortality rate within 30 days of visiting the hospital compared to men’s 11.49 percent mortality rate. That may not seem like a lot, but it translates to tens of thousands of lives saved each year.

“Elderly hospitalized patients treated by female internists have lower mortality and readmissions compared with those cared for by male internists,” the study concluded.

The most perplexing part of the study is that no one can say what female doctors are doing differently to account for their better patient outcomes.

Women consistently had better outcomes even when researchers took into account the age, gender, wealth, and overall condition of the patients seeking treatment. The study controlled for the types of hospitals, intensive care units and other variables that could be skewing the numbers, but every time, female hospitalists had better mortality rates. Patients with irregular heart rhythm, kidney failure and Pneumonia all had better outcomes with women, according to the study.

The Medicare patients of female doctors were also less likely to be readmitted within 30 days. Additionally, patients suffering ailments such as sepsis, congestive heart failure, gastrointestinal bleeding, pulmonary disease were all less likely to be readmitted within a month if they were treated by a female doctor.

Scientists studied more than 1.5 million cases involving 58,322 hospitalists.

“These findings suggest that the differences in practice patterns between male and female physicians, as suggested in previous studies, may have important clinical implications for patient outcomes,” the study’s authors concluded.

According to the study’s authors Dr. Tsugawa Yusuke, Dr. B. Jena Anupam,and Dr. Jose F. Figueroa, women have proven in past studies to be more likely to follow clinical guidelines, provide preventative care, “use more patient-centered communication,” and provide psychological counseling.

Since male doctors outnumber females about 2 to 1 and because the small statistical difference in outcomes translates to more than 30,000 lives saved each year, the next step should be figuring out why women are doing a better job than their counterparts in keeping patients alive, the study concluded. That way, the male doctors could learn from the women.

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