HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Dec. 19, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Older Americans who land in the hospital are more likely to survive if their doctor is a woman, a new study suggests.
In a national study, researchers found that older hospital patients treated by female internists had a slightly lower death rate than those treated by men.
Their risk of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days was also slightly lower, the findings showed.
The differences were “modest,” said senior researcher Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
Overall, less than 11.1 percent of patients treated by female internists died within 30 days. That compared with just under 11.5 percent among patients treated by male internists.
Still, Jha said, that difference translates into about 32,000 fewer deaths in the United States annually.
“It’s similar to the number of people who die in motor vehicle accidents each year,” he said.
The findings, published online Dec. 19 in JAMA Internal Medicine, do not prove that women are better doctors.
There could be other reasons that female internists’ patients fared better, according to Jha.
But, he said, his team dug for other explanations and did not find any.
The researchers accounted for differences in the patient populations that female and male doctors treated, and differences in the hospitals where they worked, among other things. And patients of female doctors still did a little better.
So what is going on? According to Jha, past studies have found that female doctors tend to practice differently than male doctors do.
For example, female doctors are more likely to follow clinical guidelines and they tend to communicate with patients more clearly.
Jha said it’s likely some of those differences might explain his team’s findings.
Dr. Anna Parks, a resident at the University of California, San Francisco, urged some caution in interpreting the results.
“We can’t know from this study whether this is cause-and-effect,” said Parks, co-author of an editorial published with the research.
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