Process and outcome changes in the care of hospitalized general medicine patients treated by female and male physicians.

Sergeant A, Saha S, Singh S, et al. Process and outcome changes in the care of hospitalized general internal medicine patients treated by female and male physicians. jama health forum. 2021; 2(7): e211615. doi: 10.1001 / jamahealthforum.2021.1615

Commentary

This study investigates differences in the outcomes of hospitalized patients treated by different physicians for men and women, but the association between these differences has not been evaluated outside the United States.

This retrospective, cross-sectional study included patients admitted to the general wards of seven hospitals in Ontario, Canada, between April 1, 2010, and October 31, 2017.

Adjusting for hospital fixed effects, patient characteristics, physician characteristics, and processes of care, all patients were admitted to the general medicine service through the emergency department and were cared for by a general internist or family physician-hospitalist.

As a result, participants included a total of 171,625 hospitalized patients with a median age of 73 years, who were cared for by 172 attending physicians (54 female physicians [31.4%] and 118 male physicians [68.6%]).

In a fully adjusted model, the data showed that patients treated by female physicians had a lower in-hospital mortality rate (2256 [4.8%] out of 46,772 patients vs. 6452 [5.2%] out of 124,853 patients). This difference was similar after adjusting for patient characteristics, but there was no statistical difference after adjusting for other physician characteristics.