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Previous Volume 334:701-707 March 14, 1996 Number 11 Next

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ABSTRACT

Background Previous studies have found that patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) who are admitted to hospitals that admit many such patients have lower mortality rates than patients in hospitals with less experience with AIDS. We examined the relation between physicians' experience with AIDS and the survival of their patients with AIDS.

Methods We studied 403 adult male patients enrolled in a staff-model health maintenance organization in whom first AIDS-defining illnesses were diagnosed from 1984 through mid-1994; we determined that these illnesses met the 1987 case definition of the Centers for Disease Control. We defined three levels of experience for the patients' 125 primary care physicians according to their experience with AIDS during residency training and the cumulative number of patients with AIDS they had cared for in their practices.

Results The median survival of the patients of physicians with the least experience in the management of AIDS was 14 months, as compared with 26 months for the patients of physicians with the most experience (P<0.001). Controlling for the severity of illness and the year of diagnosis, we found that the patients cared for by physicians with the most experience had a 31 percent lower risk of death than the patients cared for by physicians with the least experience (P<0.02). Among 244 patients with an AIDS-defining illness diagnosed from 1989 through 1994, after adjustment for the CD4+ cell count and the severity of illness, the risk of death was 43 percent lower for patients of the most experienced physicians than for patients of the least experienced (P<0.02).

Conclusions The experience of primary care physicians in the management of AIDS is significantly associated with survival among their patients.

Because previous studies of hospitals have found a relation between the admission of higher numbers of patients with AIDS-related conditions and lower inpatient mortality,^1-4 we sought to determine whether more experience with the management of AIDS on the part of primary care physicians is associated with increased survival among their patients with AIDS.

Methods

Study Setting

We conducted a retrospective cohort study at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, a staff-model health maintenance organization (HMO) with headquarters in Seattle. Group Health provides comprehensive medical care for a fixed, prepaid fee to approximately 385,000 enrollees in western Washington, 84 percent of whom have their premiums at least partly paid by their employers. Family physicians provide most primary care at Group Health and are responsible for both outpatient and inpatient care of defined groups of patients. The care of patients infected with HIV is distributed among all primary care physicians in Group Health's generalist-based model of care. Referral to specialists is at the discretion of the primary care physicians, and there are no financial incentives to limit referrals. Insurance coverage for patients with AIDS is maintained through several financial arrangements that extend beyond the end of their employment; as a result, less than 3 percent of these patients leave Group Health for reasons other than death.

Study Patients

We identified 429 adults in whom initial AIDS-defining illnesses were diagnosed between January 1, 1984, and June 30, 1994; these diagnoses met the 1987 surveillance case definition of the Centers for Disease Control⁵ and were recorded in the Group Health HIV/AIDS Surveillance Database. A review of medical records enabled us to apply these criteria to all cases consistently. We were not able to use the expanded case definition of AIDS, which includes a CD4+ cell count of less than 200 per cubic millimeter (or less than 14 percent of lymphocytes⁶), because CD4+ cell counts were not included in the computerized records before 1989. All patients had serologically confirmed HIV infection. Of the Group Health patients with AIDS, 95 percent were men whose risk factor for HIV transmission was that they had had sexual contact with men. We excluded from the study 13 women and 6 men who had other risk factors. We also excluded four men because their primary care physicians changed within a year before the diagnosis of AIDS or at any time thereafter; three more men were excluded because their primary care physicians had subspecialty certification in infectious diseases or pulmonary medicine. The remaining 403 men made up the study cohort.

Study Physicians

The study physicians were the 125 physicians who provided primary care for patients in the cohort. These primary care physicians had been trained in internal medicine, family medicine, or general practice. We defined the physicians' level of experience with AIDS with a modification of criteria developed by Ramsey and colleagues that measure experience in the care of patients with AIDS in medical school, residency, and practice.^7,8 Estimates of physicians' experience in medical school and residency were derived from the rates of incidence of AIDS for the metropolitan areas where the physicians trained and the calendar years in which their training was completed.^7,8 We defined practice experience as the cumulative number of patients with AIDS whose care a physician had managed at the time a patient in the physician's practice was given a first diagnosis of an AIDS-defining illness; the new patient was included in this total. As each patient entered the cohort, he was identified as his physician's first, second to fifth, or sixth or subsequent patient with AIDS. The categories of medical school and residency experience were equivalent for the study physicians. Therefore, we combined the residency and practice experience of the individual physicians to define three levels of a physician's experience with AIDS: least experience, moderate experience, and most experience (Figure 1). Some physicians moved from lower to higher experience categories during the 10-year study period, as AIDS-defining illnesses developed in more of their patients. Therefore, some physicians were not assigned to the same experience category for all of their patients with AIDS.

View larger version (3K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Categories of Physicians' Experience with AIDS. Experience with AIDS during residency and practice was combined into three overall categories: least, moderate, and most. Physicians who completed their residency training before 1984 or trained in a metropolitan area with an incidence of AIDS of less than 15 per 100,000 were classified as having a low level of residency experience. Those who completed training in 1984 or later in a metropolitan area with an incidence of AIDS of 15 or more per 100,000 were classified as having a high level of residency experience. A physician's practice-experience category was separately determined at the time an AIDS-defining illness was diagnosed in each patient, according to whether the patient was the physician's first, second to fifth, or sixth or subsequent patient with AIDS. No physician in our study had both a high level of residency experience and a high level of practice experience.

 
Sources of Data

We obtained information on the patients in the study, including age at diagnosis, race or ethnic group, AIDS-defining illness and date of diagnosis, risk factors for HIV transmission, and date on which care from Group Health ended (because of death or transfer from the HMO), from the Group Health HIV/AIDS Surveillance Database. Dates of death were confirmed by cross-matching with the Washington State vital records. We obtained laboratory and pharmacy data and the name of each patient's primary care physician from Group Health's Utilization Management/Cost Management Information System. Personnel records provided information on the study physicians' specialty training and the locations and dates of their medical school and residency training.

Statistical Analysis

To control for improved survival due to advances in the treatment of AIDS, we grouped the dates on which patients were given diagnoses of AIDS-defining illnesses into three calendar-year periods. The first period, 1984 to 1986, preceded the availability of zidovudine and chemoprophylaxis against Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which became available by the second period, 1987 to 1988.^9,10 By the third period, 1989 to 1994, both drug regimens were in general use^11,12 and zidovudine was recommended for patients with CD4+ cell counts below 500 per cubic millimeter.¹³ Previous cohort studies of HIV-infected homosexual and bisexual men have found increases in survival from the earliest to the latest of these periods.^14,15

Severity of illness at entry into the study was determined according to a three-stage classification of AIDS-defining diagnoses developed by Turner and colleagues.¹⁶ Conditions such as Kaposi's sarcoma are included in the category of least severe illness, moderately severe illness is defined as P. carinii pneumonia, and the category of most severe illness includes diagnoses such as disseminated infection with Mycobacterium avium complex. CD4+ cell counts at the time of the diagnosis of AIDS were available for 244 of the 278 patients in whom first AIDS-defining illnesses were diagnosed from 1989 to 1994 (88 percent) and were classified into four levels: 0 to 49, 50 to 99, 100 to 199, and 200 or more per cubic millimeter.

We estimated median survival and survival curves from the time of the diagnosis of AIDS according to the patient's age, the calendar period of the diagnosis, the severity of illness, the CD4+ cell count at diagnosis, and physician-experience category, using Kaplan–Meier survival analysis.¹⁷ Statistical significance was evaluated with the log-rank test. Unadjusted and adjusted relative risks of death according to physician-experience category, the calendar period of the diagnosis, the severity of illness, and the CD4+ cell count at diagnosis were estimated with Cox proportional-hazards analysis.^18,19 Statistical significance for the relative risks was evaluated with the likelihood-ratio test. The test for trend in proportions²⁰ was used to examine the relation between a physician's use of prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia, measurement of CD4+ cells, and use of antiretroviral therapy and that physician's level of experience with AIDS. The association between the use of prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia and the occurrence of P. carinii pneumonia as a patient's AIDS-defining illness was evaluated with the chi-square test. We used generalized estimating equations to evaluate the robustness of the results with respect to the assumption of statistical independence among patients.²¹ We also examined physician-experience category as a time-dependent covariate to take into account the experience gained during the care of an individual patient with AIDS. Two-tailed P values of 0.05 or less were considered to indicate significance in all statistical tests.

Results

The mean age of the patients at the time of the diagnosis of AIDS was 39 years (range, 23 to 67). Ninety-four percent of the patients were white, and for 70 percent the AIDS-defining diagnoses were P. carinii pneumonia and other opportunistic infections (Table 1). Of the study physicians, 85 percent were trained in family medicine or general practice, and 15 percent in internal medicine. By the end of the study period, 49 physicians (39 percent) remained in the category of least experience, having managed the care of only one patient with AIDS during the 10 years. By the end of the study, 52 physicians (42 percent) had acquired moderate experience, and 24 (19 percent) had entered the category with the most experience.

View this table: [in this window] [in a new window]   Table 1. Characteristics of the 403 Study Patients.

 
We found significant differences in survival among the patients with AIDS under the care of physicians with different levels of experience, as shown in Figure 2. Median survival for the patients of physicians with the least experience was 14 months, as compared with 21 months for the patients of physicians with moderate experience and 26 months for the patients of physicians with the most experience (P<0.001 by the log-rank test). As in previous studies, there was a significant increase in survival during the later years of the study period^14,15 and a significant decrease in survival among the patients with more severe illness¹⁶ and lower CD4+ cell counts²² (Table 2). Neither age at diagnosis nor use of antiretroviral therapy was associated with survival in our cohort (data not shown). An appropriate survival model showing the effects of prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia could not be constructed because we were not able to study survival from the beginning of immunologic AIDS¹⁴ — that is, from the point when a patient's CD4+ cell count dropped below 200 per cubic millimeter or 14 percent.⁶ There were too few nonwhite patients in the cohort to enable us to estimate an effect of race on survival.

View larger version (4K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 2. Kaplan–Meier Analysis of Survival after the Diagnosis of AIDS, According to Physician-Experience Category. P<0.001 by the log-rank test.

 

View this table: [in this window] [in a new window]   Table 2. Median Survival and Relative Risk (RR) of Death According to Selected Variables.

 
As shown in Table 2, the adjusted relative risk of death was 0.69 for patients of the physicians with the most experience as compared with patients of the physicians with the least experience, after we controlled for the severity of illness and the calendar period in which the diagnosis was made (P<0.02). Figure 3 shows that for each multiyear period, patients cared for by physicians with more experience with AIDS had a lower risk of death. Controlling for the time of diagnosis in one-year increments yielded virtually the same estimates of the effect of physicians' experience on the relative risk of death (data not shown). Allowing for the increases in the level of physicians' experience that took place during the period of care of an individual study patient also did not affect the results (data not shown). The results of analyses with generalized estimating equations were similar to the results of the analysis of survival.

View larger version (7K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 3. Relative Risk of Death for Patients in Each Physician-Experience Category, According to the Date of Diagnosis of AIDS. The reference category was the patients in whom AIDS was diagnosed in 1984 through 1986 whose physicians had the least experience with AIDS. The relative risks were adjusted for severity of illness.

 
Among the 244 patients for whom CD4+ cell counts were available (patients in whom AIDS was diagnosed from 1989 to 1994), the adjusted relative risk of death was 0.57 for patients of the most experienced physicians as compared with patients of the least experienced, after adjustment for CD4+ cell count and the severity of illness (P<0.02). Among the first three patients with AIDS cared for by each physician (a total of 219 patients), the adjusted relative risks of death for the second and third patients as compared with the first patient were 0.73 and 0.54, respectively, after adjustment for the calendar period of diagnosis, the severity of illness, and experience during residency training (P<0.02 by the likelihood-ratio test; data not shown). The effect of experience on patients' relative risk was similar for both patients of the physicians who ultimately reached the highest level of experience and patients of the physicians who ended the study period at the level of least or moderate experience (data not shown).

Table 3 shows characteristics of the care of the 212 patients in whom AIDS was diagnosed from 1989 to 1994 who had CD4+ cell counts of less than 200 per cubic millimeter before diagnosis. With increasing experience on the part of physicians, there was a significant increase in the proportion of patients receiving prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia before being given a diagnosis of AIDS. Of the patients who did not receive prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia, 54 percent had P. carinii pneumonia as their AIDS-defining illness, as compared with 16 percent of the patients who did receive appropriate prophylaxis (P<0.001). The patients of physicians with greater experience were more likely to have had at least two CD4+ cell counts performed in the year before the diagnosis of AIDS than were patients of physicians with less experience (P<0.001), and there was a trend toward an increased use of antiretroviral therapy by the more experienced physicians (P = 0.06).

View this table: [in this window] [in a new window]   Table 3. Management Strategies for 212 Patients with CD41 Cell Counts of Less Than 200 per Cubic Millimeter before the Diagnosis of AIDS, According to Physicians' Experience.

 
Discussion

The experience of primary care physicians in the management of AIDS is significantly associated with their patients' survival. After adjusting for the severity of disease and changes in the treatment of AIDS over time, we found a 31 percent lower risk of death for patients cared for by physicians with the most experience as compared with patients of physicians with the least experience. Among patients in whom AIDS was diagnosed from 1989 to 1994, the adjusted risk of death was 43 percent lower for the patients of the most experienced physicians than for the patients of the least experienced, after we controlled for the CD4+ cell count and the severity of illness.

Our results support the hypothesis of Luft and colleagues that, in the treatment of disease, practice makes perfect.²³ It has been proposed that experience resulting from higher patient volume may lead to better management strategies and improved outcomes for patients.^24,25 A possible explanation for our findings is that physicians acquire general knowledge about AIDS either during their residency training or while taking care of the first patient with AIDS in their practice. They are then exposed to a greater number of AIDS-related conditions through caring for their next few patients, but they may require a case load of more than five patients to gain enough experience to achieve the best outcomes. The primary care physicians in our study were responsible for both outpatient and inpatient care. This study complements previous research on the experience of hospitals with AIDS by showing that the experience of individual physicians is important as well and suggests that physicians' experience may be an important component of the hospital experience.

We addressed the possibility that selective referral²³ may have biased our results in several ways. Some physicians who are perceived to be more comfortable taking care of HIV-infected patients may have a disproportionate number of patients with AIDS in their practices. Furthermore, patients who selected these physicians to direct their care may have been more knowledgeable about their disease or more compliant with treatment. To limit this possible form of bias, we excluded patients whose primary care physician changed within the year before the diagnosis of AIDS or thereafter. We also verified that similarities among the patients within individual physicians' practices did not account for the effect of physicians' experience on survival. Finally, it is unlikely that patients would be selectively referred to physicians who had directed the care of only one or two previous patients with AIDS and who had not demonstrated relatively good outcomes. We examined the first three patients of all study physicians and found a steady improvement in survival for each successive patient. This was true for the first three patients of both the physicians who ultimately acquired the most patients with AIDS and the physicians who remained in the two lower categories of experience. Therefore, our findings suggest that the physicians in this study went through a similar learning period and began to improve their management skills and strategies early in their experience.

Markson and colleagues found that primary care generalists adopted new therapies for AIDS more slowly than AIDS specialists.²⁶ The use of several methods of care was associated with the higher levels of physicians' experience in our study. The appropriate use of prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia was strongly linked to increasing experience. Such prophylaxis may delay or prevent the development of P. carinii pneumonia in patients infected with HIV^14,27,28 and lengthen their survival.^15,29,30 The patients of physicians with more experience also had more frequent CD4+ cell counts in the year before the diagnosis of AIDS, a finding that suggests there was closer follow-up of HIV-infected patients and an increased ability to begin prophylaxis against P. carinii pneumonia at an appropriate time. The use of antiretroviral therapy was also associated with the higher levels of physicians' experience, although the data on the effectiveness of such therapy are equivocal.^31-33 Further study is needed to determine whether other management strategies may have contributed to the effect of physicians' experience on survival.

There is ongoing debate about the role of generalists and specialists in the care of patients at all stages of HIV disease.^34,35 Some authors suggest that primary care for patients infected with HIV should be integrated into general medical practice.^36,37 This is currently the case in some settings,³⁸ although in others primary care is provided by specialists in the treatment of HIV disease.³⁹ There are only limited data to support the use of any particular organizational arrangement. The physicians in our study were generalists who provided primary care in a setting in which specialists are routinely involved in the care of patients with AIDS and in which there are no financial incentives limiting referrals or hospitalizations. Therefore, our conclusions may be generalizable only to family physicians practicing in a managed-care setting that includes ready access to consultation with specialists. For a primary care physician, gaining experience may involve acquiring information from specialists and interacting effectively with consultants.

The patients of the most experienced physicians in our study had a median survival time similar to the longest reported in other clinical studies,^15,40 demonstrating that in this type of environment, generalists who provide primary care for patients with AIDS can perform well.

Our results suggest that there is a need to organize health care delivery and training for physicians in ways that will optimize outcomes for patients with AIDS who are cared for by physicians at all levels of experience. A combination of generalist and specialist care may be effective in managing the complex medical conditions associated with AIDS.

Supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Clinical Scholars Program (to Dr. Kitahata). The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

We are indebted to Susan M. McDonald, Richard C. Moyer, Gregory K. Pang, Patricia Philbin, Karen S. Lewis-Smith, Drs. Robert L. Thompson, and Barbara E. Young at Group Health, without whom this study could not have been performed; to Drs. Eric B. Larson, Harold L. Martin, Julie M. Overbaugh, and Robert W. Wood for their review of the manuscript; and to Drs. G. Eric Archibeque, Ann C. Collier, Thomas S. Inui, and Bruce M. Psaty for helpful discussions.

Source Information

From the Departments of Medicine (M.M.K., T.D.K., R.A.D., C.L.M.), Health Services (T.D.K., R.A.D., E.H.W.), and Epidemiology (T.D.K.), University of Washington; and the Center for Health Studies (E.H.W.), Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound (W.T.D.) — all in Seattle.

Address reprint requests to Dr. Kitahata at the University of Washington, Center for AIDS and STD, 1001 Broadway, Suite 215, Seattle, WA 98122.

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Related Letters:

Physicians' Experience and Survival in Patients with AIDS
Coker R. J., Poznansky M. C., Bach P. B., Guerra-Romero L., Vazquez F. P., Macher A. M., Goosby E. P., Kitahata M. M., Maxwell C. L., Volberding P. A.
Extract | Full Text  
N Engl J Med 1996; 335:349-351, Aug 1, 1996. Correspondence

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