Patient mortality was found to be lower in female physicians

American and Japanese scientists conducted a retrospective observational study and found that female physicians have a slightly lower patient mortality rate than male physicians. The publication appeared in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Yusuke Tsugawa of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues from the U.S. and Japan studied a random 20 percent sample of U.S. patients hospitalized under Medicare for 2016-2019. Comparisons were made at the hospital level to assess the impact of physician gender on outcomes at the same facility. The final analysis included more than 458,000 female patients and nearly 319,000 male patients; of those, 31.1 percent and 30.6 percent were treated by female physicians, respectively.

It turned out that among those treated by women, mortality in the first 30 days, adjusted for comorbidities, was significantly lower: 8.15 versus 8.38 percent; mean marginal effect -0.24 percentage points (95 percent confidence interval -0.41 to -0.07). Men treated with women also had a slightly lower mortality rate, but statistically insignificant: 10.15 versus 10.23 percent; mean marginal effect -0.08 percentage points (95 percent confidence interval -0.29 to 0.14).