Clinical algorithms are risk calculators and decision tools that doctors use every day, and many of them take a patient’s race into account. In Boston, for example, paediatrician Alexandra Epee-Bounya used a calculator to assess young children’s risk of a urinary tract infection that added two points if the child was a girl and one point if the child was not Black. The more points, the higher the estimated risk, and the more likely the child was to receive follow-up testing.
This article opens STAT’s “Embedded Bias” series, which spent more than a year investigating why race, a social construct rather than a biological fact, is still so widely used in medicine. Race-adjusted calculators, used for example to assess kidney function, lung capacity and the risk of urinary tract infections, have been shown to underdiagnose and harm patients of colour. Although some hospitals and medical organisations have started to change, many of these algorithms remain in use. Across the series, the reporters identified 48 race-based clinical algorithms still in use.
Some argue that race can still provide useful predictive information, for example in breast cancer or surgical risk calculators. Critics say this reinforces the false idea that race is a biological category.
Learn more here: https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/03/embedded-bias-investigation-health-equity-clinical-algorithms/
Reference:
Palmer, K., & McFarling, U. L. (2024, September 3). Doctors use problematic race-based algorithms to guide care every day. Why are they so hard to change? STAT.