Thursday, October 01, 2020

Extra visit time with patients may explain part of wage gap for female physicians

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/bawh-evt093020.php

News Release 30-Sep-2020
Brigham and Women's Hospital

A new study led by researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis sheds light on why female primary care physicians receive lower wages than their male counterparts. The study found that female PCPs generated 11 percent less revenue due to conducting 11 percent fewer visits in a year (doctors are largely paid by the visit). But while previous studies based on surveys have suggested that this wage gap is due, in part, to female physicians working fewer hours than male physicians, the new study finds just the opposite: Female physicians spent more time with their patients per visit, per day, and per year. Results are published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"When talking about the gender wage gap, researchers have long assumed that women are working fewer hours, or that they're working part time," said first author Ishani Ganguli, MD, MPH, a health policy researcher and assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham's Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care. "Yet when we compared just the time doctors spent face to face with patients alone, women physicians, in fact, spent more time than their male counterparts despite making 87 cents to the dollar for that work."

•••••


No comments:

Post a Comment