Sponsors looking to increase diversity in clinical trials should, among other things, “meet patients where they are,” hire a more diverse pool of trial investigators, train nonminority investigators and deploy a patient-centric model for trials that includes input from Community Advisory Boards (CABs). Read the Article
African Americans are routinely under-treated for their pain compared with whites, according to research. A study released in 2016 sheds some disturbing light on why that might be the case.
Researchers are finding that population density is not associated with higher death rates from COVID-19.
Unfortunately, some people still blame compact housing and transit for pandemic spikes, and use that misinformation to promote sprawling residential development and disinvestment in transit in the name of health. These are the same poor practices that have segregated neighborhoods and contributed to drastic disparities in health and wealth for a century.
Compared with whites, members of racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive preventive health services and often receive lower-quality care. They also have worse health outcomes for certain conditions. To combat these disparities, advocates say health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism factor into health care. This issue of Transforming Care offers examples of health systems that are making efforts to identify implicit bias and structural racism in their organizations, and developing customized approaches to engaging and supporting patients to ameliorate their effects.
Delaying medical care can cause catastrophic health and financial problems.
That’s why early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily expanded its telehealth coverage so physicians, nurse practitioners, clinical psychologists and licensed clinical social workers would be reimbursed for telehealth services. Other payers followed suit.
In spite of significant advances in the diagnosis and treatment of most chronic diseases, there is evidence that racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower quality of care than nonminorities and that, patients of minority ethnicity experience greater morbidity and mortality from various chronic diseases than nonminorities.
Health care professionals learn that some diseases may be associated with various population groups.
In today’s America, minority patients still have markedly worse health outcomes than white patients. The differences are greatest for black Americans: Compared to white patients, they are two to three times as likely to die of preventable heart disease and stroke. They also have higher rates of cancer, asthma, influenza,pneumonia, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and homicide. For many of them, structural racism and unequal treatment remain a contributing factor to disease and death.
Implicit attitudes are thoughts and feelings that often exist outside of conscious awareness, and thus are difficult to consciously acknowledge and control. Negative implicit attitudes about people of color may contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in health and healthcare.
Disparities in health care are of great concern with much attention focused on the potential for unconscious bias to paly a role in this problem.
