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What if your doctor's gender could influence your chance of surviving a visit to the hospital? A big study of older patients hospitalized for common illnesses raises that provocative possibility — and also lots of questions. Patients who got most of their care from women doctors were more likely to leave the hospital alive than those treated by men. (Tanner, 12/19)

When a patient goes to the best hospital, he or she usually hopes for a doctor who is knowledgeable and experienced. Something else to wish for? 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 Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. (Luthra, 12/19)

The findings not only launch a grenade at the gender pay gap in medicine, they also suggest the methods of female physicians — if replicated broadly — could significantly improve the quality of medical care in the United States. (Ross, 12/19)

An estimated 32,000 fewer patients would die every year “if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians,” the authors, a group of Harvard researchers, wrote in the study. Patients treated by women had mortality rates of 11.07%, compared with 11.49% for those seen by men. Readmission rates were 15.02% among those seen by women, compared with 15.57% for male physicians. (Whitman, 12/19)

The researchers estimated that if male physicians could achieve the same results as their female colleagues, they would save an extra 32,000 lives among Medicare patients alone each year --  a feat that would rival wiping out motor vehicle accident deaths nationwide. Previous studies have found that female physicians are more likely to follow practice guidelines based on scientific evidence. They also spend more time with patients, talk with them in more reassuring and positive ways and ask more questions about their emotional and social well-being. (Painter, 12/19)

"The association was consistent across a variety of conditions and across patients’ severity of illness,” report authors wrote. “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.” (Braverman, 12/19)

Vineet Arora, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, praised the research but was cautious to read too much into the main result, pointing out that it was important to remember the effect might stem from multiple factors. “It could be something the doctor is doing. It could be something about how the patient is reacting to the doctor,” Arora said. “It’s really hard to say. It's probably multi-factorial.” What the study drove home for Arora, who works as a hospitalist, is that women are certainly not worse doctors than men — and they should be compensated equitably. (Johnson, 12/19)

The study, published Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine, explored possible reasons for the gap, including the chance that male doctors cared for more severely ill patients, and where doctors worked. Research suggests doctors practice differently across regions of the U.S. and studies show that hospital quality varies. But nothing explained the difference, raising questions about what might be the cause. An answer is important, because it may identify ways that some doctors get better results—ways that can be copied by other doctors to improve care overall, health-care quality researchers said. (Evans, 12/19)