The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is awarding more than $10 million to five health organizations to reconsider the use of race in medical algorithms, which research shows can lead to potentially dangerous results for patients of color.
Physicians have used medical assessment tools and algorithms since the 1970s to help make decisions about patient care. These tools look at multiple factors including, unbeknownst to most patients, race. Recent studies have found that some algorithms that consider race lead to biased assessments and the denial of treatment options.
“The inequities of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd really served as catalyst to change things,” says Nwamaka Eneanya, a nephrologist and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is not receiving funding from the foundation. Four national medical organizations and one New York City-based coalition will receive grants ranging from $1.36 million to $3.4 million to identify, update, and provide guidelines on medical algorithms that use race and to research how the tools work in hospitals.
- The American Society of Hematology will explore how people of African or Middle Eastern ancestry are told incorrectly they have unhealthy levels of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. The organization aims to work with at least 10 hospital systems to evaluate those cells more accurately and to research the impact of medications on people with low counts of neutrophils.
Several grantees have already begun to change and update their guidelines. The American Academy of Pediatrics removed a calculation in 2021 that found Black children faced lower risks of urinary-tract infections than white children. Some opposition comes from people who believe that including race in algorithms may improve care for patients of color, says Jones from Harvard Medical School, or who are reluctant to change algorithms without further research. But he says that race was included in many algorithms without research proving their efficacy in the first place and that better measures may exist.
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