Take Racism Out of Medical Algorithms

December 1, 2020

(Scientific American) – COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on Black and Indigenous communities and other people of color, and U.S. medical institutions should be doing everything they can to root out and eliminate entrenched racial inequities. Yet many of the screening assessments used in health care are exacerbating racism in medicine, automatically and erroneously changing the scores given to people of color in ways that can deny them needed treatment.