Study: Hospital patients do better with women docs
By Efali Luthra, Kaiser Health News
When patients go to the hospital, they hope for a doctor who is knowledgeable and experienced, but new research suggests they might start wishing for something else: a woman physician.
That’s because female doctors may on average be better than their male counterparts at treating patients in the hospital and keeping them healthy long-term, according to findings published last month in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The study, conducted by a team of researchers at Harvard, examined a random sample of Medicare patients hospitalized between January 2011 and December 2014 treated by general internists. Overall, the researchers scrutinized more than 1.5 million hospitalizations, controlling for differences in hospitals and patient cases.