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If you are sick, elderly and in a hospital, you are more likely to survive when your primary doctor during that hospitalization is a woman, a new study shows.

The patients of female doctors are also less likely to be re-hospitalized in the month after discharge, according to the study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“We found a modest but, I think, clinically important difference in outcomes for patients cared for by female physicians as opposed to male physicians,” said the study’s senior author, Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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.

The Harvard team wanted to find out if such differences translated to better outcomes. So they looked at the records of more than 1.5 million Medicare patients, ages 65 and over, hospitalized for non-surgical care between 2011 and 2014. The average age of the patients was 80.

After adjusting for factors such as each patient's age, gender and income and the doctors’ ages, training and hospital location, they found that 11.07% of patients treated by female internists died within a month, while 11.49% of those treated by male internists did.

Repeat hospitalizations, which can be signs of poorer care, were reported for 15.02% of patients treated by women and 15.57% of those treated by men.

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For patients treated by a female doctor, that translated to a 4% lower relative risk of dying prematurely and a 5% lower relative risk of being readmitted to a hospital within 30 days, the researchers found.

The outcome gaps were seen in patients with a range of illnesses of varying severity. And the findings do not appear to be explained by higher-risk patients choosing male physicians or vice versa, Jha said, because they held up when the researchers looked only at hospital-based doctors who take cases as they come.

The study does not prove that women are better doctors than men, but it does suggest many have professional habits that all doctors could learn from, he said.

“As a male physician, I find that reassuring, because it means there’s something we can do about it,” he said.

Women make up about one third of practicing physicians and half of recent medical school graduates.

They often make less money than male colleagues, something the new research suggests is unjustified, said an editorial written by journal editor Rita Redberg and Anna Parks, both internists at the University of California, San Francisco. They cited a recent study showing women physicians who work in academic settings make 8% less than male colleagues and face other inequities.

“These findings that female internists provide higher quality care for hospitalized patients yet are promoted, supported, and paid less than male peers in the academic setting should push us to create systems that promote equity,” they wrote.

EMBARGOED for 11 a.m. ET MONDAY DEC 19