Organizational Ethics Consortia: Racially Concordant Care
Channel: HMS Center for Bioethics
Date: 2021-03-01

If Racially Concordant Care is a Benefit for Black Patients how should Health Care Organizations Respond?

January 22, 2021 Organizational Ethics Consortia

Reducing racial disparities in health outcomes is an urgent priority for many health care organizations, leading to a continual search for novel organization-level interventions that can yield substantive health gains for Black patients in particular.

One emerging line of research demonstrates that Black patients treated by Black physicians achieve better health outcomes in several domains compared with Black patients seen by non-Black physicians. Recent studies demonstrate a 50% reduction in Black-White infant mortality gaps and a 19% decline in male cardiovascular mortality with racially concordant care.

What implications does this line of research have for developing an organizational approach to reducing racial disparities? Do these studies merely underscore the need to improve the diversity of the physician workforce? Or, should administrators looking to create an anti-racist health care organization take proactive steps to match Black patients with available Black physicians? How might such programs be understood in the context of the historical effort to desegregate medicine?

Presented by:
Adam Biggs, PhD
Instructor  
African American Studies and History
University of South Carolina Lancaster

Lauren Taylor, MPH, MDiv, PhD
Post Doctoral Fellow
Department of Population Health
NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Osaze Udeagbala, MBA
Medical Student
NYU Langone Health

Moderated by:
Kelsey Berry, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Center for Bioethics
Harvard Medical School

Charlotte H. Harrison, PhD, JD, MPH, MTS
Hospital Ethicist and Director of the Office of Ethics
Boston Children’s Hospital