Female Doctors Have Better Patient Outcomes

Guest: Anupam Jena, MD, Association Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Physician in the Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital Next time you end up in the hospital, you might want to hope your doctor is a woman. Hospital patients who are treated by female doctors have a better chance of survival than those treated by male doctors. That’s the conclusion of an analysis published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine that looked at more than a million and a half Medicare patients who were hospitalized. Here’s one way of looking at the difference: if all Medicare patients in the hospital were treated by female doctors, there would be 32,000 fewer patient deaths every year.