Is Race Correction in Medicine Hurting Your Patients?
Doctors and providers use medical algorithms and equations when assessing a patient’s risk of illness or disease and recommending treatment. However, many of these programs use race as part of the analytics process. In fact, they may alter their recommendations or findings once the patient’s race is added into the system, a trend known as race correction.
But critics say these “corrections” tend to be misleading – if not dangerous – to patients of color.
What Is Race Correction?
Race correction is defined as the use of a patient’s race in a scientific equation that then influences how they are treated. That means some diagnostic algorithms and risk predictor tools will essentially adjust or “correct” their results based on the person’s race.