Does Physician Experience Affect Patient Mortality?

The rapid growth of hospital medicine in the U.S. has brought constant entry of new physicians into the field. Do patients managed by these freshly minted hospitalists have outcomes similar to those of patients cared for by more-experienced hospitalists? Investigators used a Medicare database to identify >21,000 hospitalists — defined as general internists, family practitioners, general practitioners, or geriatricians for whom at least 90% of bills were for services to hospitalized patients. One quarter of hospitalists had ≤1 year of experience, and about half had ≥4 years of experience.

In a subset of nearly 4000 first-year hospitalists (in 2008 through 2011) who continued hospitalist practice for at least 4 years, researchers evaluated mor…