Study shows women are still better at everything

Yesterday in JAMA:

We found that elderly patients receiving inpatient care from female internists had 30-day lower mortality and readmission rates compared with patients cared for by male internists. This association was consistent across a variety of conditions and across patients’ severity of illness. Taken together with previous evidence suggesting that male and female physicians may practice differently, our findings indicate that potential differences in practice patterns between male and female physicians may have important clinical implications for patient outcomes.

and

Furthermore, given that there are more than 10 million Medicare hospitalizations due to medical conditions in the United States annually and assuming that the association between sex and mortality is causal, we estimate that approximately 32 000 fewer patients would die if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians every year.

Confirmation bias aside, this general finding does ring true to me.

Reading a bit deeper, though, one physician characteristic that was underplayed was that female physicians saw fewer patients overall (i.e. more were part-time). This might function as a proxy for burnout and its associated poor patient care outcomes. Something to consider for the men who are already in medicine and dragging it down.

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