More family doctors cut hospital costs

BOSTON, May 9 (UPI) -- Increasing the number of U.S. family physicians reduces hospital re-admissions significantly, researchers suggest.

Senior author Dr. Brian Jack, an associate professor of Boston University School of Medicine/Boston Medical Center, says researchers found that adding one family physician per 1,000 patients could reduce hospital re-admission costs by $579 million per year.

The researchers used data from the Hospital Compare database -- which included re-admission rates for pneumonia, heart attack and heart failure -- for 4,459 hospitals as well as the Area Source File that contains data for physicians per population at the county level.

Combined, re-admissions for pneumonia, heart attack and heart failure in 2005 accounted for 15.7 percent of all re-admissions and numbered 74,419, 20,866 and 90,273, respectively; with corresponding Medicare expenditures of $533 million, $136 million and $590 million, respectively.

"Using these data, we found that 30-day re-admission rates for all three diagnoses decrease as the number of family physicians increases," Jack says in a statement. "Conversely, increased numbers of physicians in all other major specialties, including general internal medicine, is associated with increased risk of readmission."