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The Older the Doctor, the Higher the Patient Mortality Rate, Study Finds (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The age of your doctor may impact the quality of the care you receive -- and even cut your chances of survival -- researchers report in the British Medical Journal. Harvard researchers looked over data on more than 700,000 hospital admissions of elderly patients cared for by nearly 19,000 physicians between 2011 and 2014. They found that mortality rates crept up in step with physician age. Patients with doctors under the age of 40 had a 30-day mortality rate of 10.8 percent. With doctors aged 40 to 49, mortality rates inched up to 11.1 percent, then to 11.3 percent with doctors 50 to 59, and 12.1 percent with doctors aged 60 or above. The stats are adjusted for a variety of variables, such as hospital mortality rates and severity of patients' illnesses. All the patients were aged 65 or older and on Medicare. Though the age-related mortality trend was significant overall, it broke down when researchers sorted doctors by caseloads. Older doctors who saw high volumes of patients didn't see their patients' mortality rates increase.
How do we know that older patients don't just like going to older doctors?
The patients were unlikely to be choosing their doctor in this study.
The doctors used for this study were hospitalists. Hospitalists care for patients admitted to the hospital.
Your regular primary care doctor is unlikely to be a hospitalist (although some hospitalists do have regular clinic days) because you are not getting admitted to the hospital for a sore throat or broken arm.
Hospitalists treat very sick people, and in the hospital where I worked, they were considered to be higher-skill doctors then your regular doctor.
The study used the records of hospitalists because generally speaking, the patient does not get a chance to choose their hospitalist, and the study wanted to avoid that factor. Also because hospitalists treat admitted patients, they are dealing with people who are far more likely die without treatment, so that makes the numbers interesting.
If they didn't ask the question, it's not a very useful study.
They adjusted for patient age. This is explained in the actual paper. They also adjusted for gender, ethnicity, household income, day of week of admission, etc.
They also considered many characteristics of the doctor besides age, including gender, medical school attended, etc.
The study adjusted for severity of the illness or injury. It also adjusted for the age of the patient.
Disclaimer: I RTFA and then clicked on the link and read the actual paper where all of this is explained.
Do doctors who take many patients mostly do the easy stuff?
The study adjusted for severity of injury or illness. So, no, that is not the explanation for the age disparity.