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Harvard study sees risks associated with older physicians

Physician Practice Advisor, February 23, 2005

Harvard University researchers released a study on February 15 that suggests that older doctors, taken as a whole, struggle to keep up with constant advances in medical technique, which results in a negative correlation between physician age and the quality of care patients receive.

The Boston Globe reported that the study, which was published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, showed that while older doctors may outpace their younger counterparts in terms of earning their patients' trust and other important criteria, they are less likely to know and follow current treatment standards for various medical complaints, and are slow to abandon outdated processes in favor of perfoming new "evidence-based medicine." The study even revealed that heart attack patients were 10% more likely to die in the care of a doctor 20 years out of medical school than in the care of a recent graduate.

Unsurprisingly, senior doctors don't agree that the standard of care they offer is lacking compared to their younger colleagues, but many of them do confess to the difficulty of remaining current with the rapid increase in medical technology. "You store a lot of factual knowledge during school, and then... you're expected to, on your own, keep up with what is an enormous flood of facts," commented Dr. Donald Berwick, president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and a 1972 medical school graduate.

The Harvard study is itself a review of 59 papers, filed since 1966, which looked at physicians' age and years out of medical school as just one criteria when measuring knowledge and quality of care. Looking at those studies cumulatively, Harvard researchers then isolated the age factor alone as it pertained to physician knowledge and quality of care.

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