Stigmatizing Words Found More Common in Black Patients ’ Electronic Health Records

Health care professionals may be more likely to use such terms as “agitated,” “aggressive,” and “not compliant” to describe Black patients in their medical notes than White patients, areport inHealth Affairs suggests.“Our findings suggest disproportionate use of negative patient descriptors for Black patients compared with their White counterparts, which raises concerns about racial bias and possible transmission of stigma in the medical record,” wrote Michael Sun and Elizabeth L. Tung, M.D., of the Universi ty of Chicago and colleagues.Numerous studies point to evidence of unequal treatment by race in the U.S. health care system and its negative impact on patients, according to the researchers. For the current study, the researchers used machine learning techniques to analyze medical providers ’ use of negative patient descriptors in the history and physical notes in the electronic health records (EHRs) of patients seen at a large urban academic medical center in Chicago. These data included health records for patients who received treatment in an emergency department, inpatient setting , or outpatient setting between January 1, 2019, and October 1, 2020.The final sample consisted of 18,459 patients (average age 47 years; 56% women) with 40,113 history and physical notes for analysis. The majority of the patients in the sample were Black (61%), followed by White (30%), Hispanic or Latino (6%), and other (3.5%). In total, 8.2% of patients had one or more neg...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: aggressive agitated bias EHR electronic health records Health Affairs history and physical notes medical record negative descriptor noncompliant Source Type: research