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You’ll also hear from Anupam Jena; he trained as both an m.d. and an economist, and now practices medicine at Mass General and teaches at Harvard. Jena is a co-author of a JAMA Internal Medicine paper that looked at what happens to patients with acute heart problems during one of the two big annual cardiology conferences. (Thanks to Craig Feied for bringing this paper to my attention.) In other words: when the doctor’s away, do patients pay? Jena’s assumption was yes, that the absence of many top cardiologists would result in higher mortality for acute heart patients. The data, however, told a different story. With high-risk heart failure, for instance … JENA: What we found is that if you’re hospitalized on a cardiology meeting date, your mortality is about 17% at 30 days, 17 to 18%. Whereas if you’re hospitalized just a few days before or a few days after, your mortality is closer to 25%. So that’s a very large difference.
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