No one expects to leave their doctor’s appointment sicker than when they walked in. Yet new research from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Harvard University and athenahealth, Inc. provides new evidence about respiratory infection transmission happening within physician offices.
Published in Health Affairs, the study compared patients who visited their primary care physician before and after someone else with influenza had been in the office. The research team found that patients visiting after a flu patient were more likely to get the flu themselves.
“It’s a widely accepted fact that patients can acquire infections in hospital settings, but we show that infection transmission can happen when you visit your doctor’s office too,” said study author Hannah Neprash, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health, noting that this is the first study to document a relationship between influenza and visit timing among a national sample of adult primary care visits.
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