A recent CNN article titled “Black or ‘Other’? Doctors may be relying on race to make decisions about your health,” discusses how race has both historically affected and currently impacts the medical decisions that doctor’s make and the subsequent care that patients receive. Among the examples it covers is the controversial eGFR (Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate), which is used to measure kidney function. eGFR is calculated through a formula that includes your blood creatinine level (creatinine is a waste product that is filtered from your blood by your kidneys) as well as other variables such as age, sex, and race. However, as CNN states, “When it comes to race, doctors […]

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) will hold a webinar on sociotechnical interventions for health disparity reduction on Wednesday, May 16th at 1pm ET. During the webinar, Katie Siek (Indiana) and Tiffany Veinot (Michigan) will discuss the conclusions from the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshop of the same name. On April 9-10, 2018, the CCC held a visioning workshop on Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction, co-located with the Society for Behavioral Medicine 39th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, in order to examine the opportunities and challenges facing sociotechnical interventions designed to improve the health of disadvantaged populations and reduce health disparities within them. Health disparities are the differences in […]