Over the last five years, health systems, medical societies, and their clinicians have been working to unravel the role of race in clinical practice. After clinical algorithms that use race as a variable came under scrutiny in 2020, several commonly used tools have been revised to align with medicine’s understanding that race is not a biological construct, but a social one.
That work has been far from easy — and isn’t getting any easier for health equity researchers and clinical guideline developers building evidence-based practices to benefit all patients. Race can appear to predict disease risk, but when it’s used as a factor in clinical decisions, it can contribute to health disparities, even leading to denied care for some patients. Federal grants tackling that issue are drying up, and health agencies are scrubbing out any mentions of health equity. But researchers are hoping to make progress by turning to alternative funding sources.
At a meeting in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, the Council of Medical Specialty Societies announced eight grants for medical societies to audit and update the role of race in their clinical practices, distributing $1 million from a $3 million, three-year grant from the Doris Duke Foundation. “There is not a whole lot of money right now in the equity space,” said council CEO Helen Burstin at the meeting. Still, she said, it’s necessary to “really rigorously re-evaluate how we consider the use of race and ethnicity in research design and clinical practice.”
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