Physician-Peer Relationships and Patient Experiences With Specialist Care

Peer relationships may motivate physicians to aspire to high professional standards but have not been a major focus of quality improvement efforts.

To determine whether peer relationships between primary care physicians (PCPs) and specialists formed during training motivate improved specialist care for patients.

In this quasi-experimental study, difference-in-differences analysis was used to estimate differences in experiences with specialist care reported by patients of the same PCP for specialists who did vs did not co-train with the PCP, controlling for any differences in patient ratings of the same specialists in the absence of co-training ties. Specialist visits resulting from PCP referrals from 2016 to 2019 in a large health system were analyzed, including a subset of undirected referrals in which PCPs did not specify a specialist. Data were collected from January 2016 to December 2019 and analyzed from March 2020 to October 2022.

The exposure was PCP-specialist overlap in training (medical school or postgraduate medical) at the same institution for at least 1 year (co-training).

Composite patient experience rating of specialist care constructed from Press Ganey's Medical Practice Survey.

Of 9920 specialist visits for 8655 patients (62.9% female; mean age, 57.4 years) with 502 specialists in 13 specialties, 3.1% (306) involved PCP-specialist dyads with a co-training tie. Co-training ties between PCPs and specialists were associated with a 9.0 percentage point higher adjusted composite patient rating of specialist care (95% CI, 5.6-12.4 percentage points; P < .001), analogous to improvement from the median to the 91st percentile of specialist performance. This association was stronger for PCP-specialist dyads with full temporal overlap in training (same class or cohort) and consistently strong for 9 of 10 patient experience items, including clarity of communication and engagement in shared decision-making. In secondary analyses of objective markers of altered specialist practice in an expanded sample of visits not limited by the availability of patient experience data, co-training was associated with changes in medication prescribing, suggesting behavioral changes beyond interpersonal communication. Patient characteristics varied minimally by co-training status of PCP-specialist dyads. Results were similar in analyses restricted to undirected referrals (in which PCPs did not specify a specialist). Concordance between PCPs and specialists in physician age, sex, medical school graduation year, and training institution (without requiring temporal overlap) was not associated with better care experiences.

In this quasi-experimental study, PCP-specialist co-training elicited changes in specialist care that substantially improved patient experiences, suggesting potential gains from strategies encouraging the formation of stronger physician-peer relationships.