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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

'Board exam performance was powerfully linked to patient risk of dying or hospital readmission. For example, there was an 8 percent reduction in the odds of dying within seven days of hospitalization in patients of physicians who scored in the top 25 percent on the exam, compared to the patients of physicians who scored in the bottom 25 percent on the exam, which was still a passing grade.'

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Controlled hospital quality? I figure the best credentialed doctors go to the best hospitals, where patients receive a lot of other care aside from the MD.

From the article:

>The researchers compared outcomes for patients within the same hospitals who were cared for by doctors with different exam scores. This allowed the researchers to eliminate, or at least minimize, the effect of differences in patient populations, hospital resources, and other variations that might influence the odds of patient death or readmission, independent of a doctor’s performance.

This is the most important question in the thread.

Did they also control across types of medicine? If the higher-scoring doctors go into types of care which are more competitive, could those practices have lower patient mortality within 7 days?

For example, maybe burn unit care is high-mortality and low-barrier, compared to sleep medicine which is low-mortality and high-barrier (I don't know how accurate this is, just providing some hypotheticals for clarity)

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