Gentry Zachary L, Ananthasekar Shivani, Chen Herbert, Fazendin Jessica M
Department of Surgery, 9967University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA.
Am Surg. 2022 Feb;88(2):177-180. doi: 10.1177/0003134820982570. Epub 2020 Dec 31.
As technology becomes more prominent in today's society, more patients turn to the Internet to self-refer for a range of surgical problems. Frequently, patients search a nearby hospital's website in order to find a physician. We hypothesized that the variability in hospital websites would make it difficult for patients to find a general surgeon for their care.
We used the US News and World Report's Hospital Rankings 2018-2019 for this study. The "Find A Doctor" page within each hospital's website was searched for the following conditions: "hernia" and "gallbladder." Information on all suggested providers was collected, including medical specialty and gender. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.
The median number of providers listed in each search was 18 (range: 1-204). For "hernia," general surgeons were not the majority of providers suggested at 12/16 institutions. For "gallbladder," general surgeons were not the majority of providers suggested at 14/16 institutions, and 3/16 institutions did not suggest any. All 16 institutions suggested a strong majority of male providers (range: 62-100% male; median: 83% male).
Considerable variation exists in the suggestion of medical providers for common general surgical problems among the top academic hospitals. Most notably, general surgeons are not listed as the primary providers for these conditions which they commonly manage. Health systems need to examine how their website suggest providers and ensure that patients can easily find the physician most suitable for their care.
随着技术在当今社会变得越来越突出，越来越多的患者通过互联网自行转诊一系列外科问题。患者经常会搜索附近医院的网站以寻找医生。我们推测医院网站的多样性会使患者难以找到普通外科医生进行治疗。
我们在本研究中使用了《美国新闻与世界报道》2018 - 2019年医院排名。在每家医院网站的“查找医生”页面中搜索以下病症：“疝气”和“胆囊”。收集所有推荐医生的信息，包括医学专业和性别。使用描述性统计分析数据。
每次搜索列出的医生中位数为18名（范围：1 - 204名）。对于“疝气”，在16家机构中，普通外科医生并非大多数推荐医生。对于“胆囊”，在16家机构中，普通外科医生并非大多数推荐医生，并且16家机构中有3家未推荐任何医生。所有16家机构推荐的男性医生占绝大多数（范围：男性占62% - 100%；中位数：男性占83%）。
顶尖学术医院在常见普通外科问题的医生推荐方面存在很大差异。最值得注意的是，普通外科医生并未被列为这些他们通常处理病症的主要推荐医生。卫生系统需要检查其网站如何推荐医生，并确保患者能够轻松找到最适合其治疗的医生。
