A little-known fact about health care is that hospitals frequently hire substitute doctors – or, as they are called in the profession, locum tenens physicians (from the Latin for “to hold the place, to substitute for”) – to temporarily cover for doctors who are vacationing, sick, attending conferences, or on leave for other reasons.
Substitute Doctors Are Becoming More Common. What Do We Know About Their Quality of Care?
A little-known fact about health care is that hospitals frequently hire substitute doctors – or, as they are called in the profession, locum tenens physicians – to temporarily cover for doctors who are vacationing, sick, attending conferences, or on leave for other reasons. But there has been concern over whether locum tenens physicians provide lower quality care compared to permanent staff. While surveys indicate that U.S. hospital administrators are generally satisfied with the quality of locum tenens’ work, little empirical data exists on the quality and costs of care delivered by these physicians. Using data from Medicare billing claims, a study suggests that temporary, contracted physicians deliver inpatient care of similar quality to their non-locum tenens colleagues. However, the analysis also found that patients treated by locum tenens physicians have slightly higher costs of care and longer lengths of stay, which raises the possibility that they deliver modestly less efficient care.