Over the last four years, health systems across the United States have phased out the use of several clinical tools that use race to predict patient outcomes, replacing them with race-free versions that carry less risk of perpetuating inequitable care.
But there’s a wide world of other calculators and algorithms used to make decisions about patients every day — many of which use race, sex, and other traits protected by federal anti-discrimination laws. As a deadline for federally funded health systems to vet those tools for discrimination approaches in May, it’s still unclear how they’ll tackle the challenge.
“There are many algorithms that still sit in this gray area,” said Rohan Khazanchi, an internal medicine and pediatrics resident physician in Boston and a research affiliate at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health & Human Rights. “We don’t really have an alternative, and we’re sitting here going, OK, how do we both comply with the rule and still adhere to what we think is clinical best practice?”
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