Physicians, take note: An analysis of more than 40,000 electronic medical records has found troubling signs of racial bias in the notes.
The study, by a team at the University of Chicago, found that physicians appear to be much more likely to use negative words to describe their Black patients in the electronic health record (EHR) and may communicate racism through the use of words and descriptions with negative connotations.
"Compared with White patients, Black patients had 2.54 times the odds of having at least one negative descriptor in the history and physical notes," Michael Sun, a third-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and lead author of the study, told Medscape Medical News. "Our findings raise concerns about stigmatizing language in the EHR and its potential to exacerbate racial and ethnic health care disparities."
Previous studies have looked at stigmatizing language in medicine and bias in clinical decision support. But Sun's group said their study, published January 19 in Health Affairs, appears to be the first to quantify such language in EHRs.
The researchers concluded that racism exists not only on the part of individual practitioners but systemically throughout medicine.
"We found that Black patients at an urban academic medical center had disproportionately higher odds of negative patient descriptors appearing in the history and physical notes of their EHRs compared with White patients.
