<story><title>Physician age and outcomes in elderly patients in hospital in the US</title><url>http://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j1797</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ghufran_syed</author><text>The title should be &amp;quot;hospital patients treated by low volume physicians are more likely to die&amp;quot;. But that would have been less likely to get published. The &amp;quot;high volume&amp;quot; group was also really NOT high volume: 200 patients per year is around 4 patients per week. So the study really tells us about very &amp;#x27;low volume&amp;#x27; providers compared to &lt;i&gt;slightly&lt;/i&gt; higher volume providers, it&amp;#x27;s interesting that that was enough to get rid of any age-related effect. That in turn suggests the effect was pretty small.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure  that &amp;quot;code written by programmers who don&amp;#x27;t program often is more likely to have bugs&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;pilots who don&amp;#x27;t fly often are more likely to crash&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;(Strictly speaking, you&amp;#x27;d want to normalize the risk of bugs &amp;#x2F; crashes per some unit of output e.g. per hour flown for pilots.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Physician age and outcomes in elderly patients in hospital in the US</title><url>http://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j1797</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tedmiston</author><text>Could it be that older (more experienced) physicians are more likely to get assigned to patients with more complex or serious conditions?&lt;p&gt;(I don&amp;#x27;t mean to state the obvious but this wasn&amp;#x27;t made explicitly clear enough to me.)&lt;p&gt;Edit: My initial comment here is probably wrong based on the detailed section &amp;quot;Adjustment variables&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Patient characteristics included age in five year increments, sex, race or ethnic group (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, other), primary diagnosis (diagnosis related group), 27 comorbidities (Elixhauser comorbidity index22), median household income of zip code (in 10ths), an indicator for dual Medicare-Medicaid coverage, day of the week of the admission date (to account for the possibility that severity of illness of patients could be higher on specific days of the week), and year indicators.</text></comment>