
The Self‑assessment for Modification of Anti‑Racism Tool (SMART): Addressing Structural Racism in Community Behavioral Health
Introduction Since the tragic murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, many healthcare organizations have created initiatives to promote anti-racism; these initiatives have ranged from organizational anti-racism statements to Black Lives Matters lanyards to the development of numerous anti-racism taskforces. In this research article, the authors seek to move beyond these more symbolic forms of…
Read MoreA Roadmap and Best Practices for Organizations to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care
Organizations can do more than report health disparities by integrating interventions to reduce disparities into their quality improvement processes. Introduction In this special symposium, the authors report findings from Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This project investigated and evaluated interventions to reduce racial and ethnic…
Read MoreHow Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities
Introduction The Black Lives Matter movement has put the spotlight on the costly impact of racism on Black lives and led to a growing recognition that racism has a structural basis and is embedded in long-standing social policy. Racism is not ahistorical and neither are U.S. health care and public health institutions and practices. Drs.…
Read MoreThe ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments
Introduction Cities are important ecosystems shaped by dynamic and interdependent biological, physical and social influences. However, Schell et al. note that few studies link research on urban ecological and evolutionary studies to that of social inequality. They argue it is integral to integrate these disciplines as human-created systems of power create uneven impacts on non-human…
Read MorePersuasion in Medicine: Messaging to Increase Vaccine Demand
Introduction Despite the demonstrated benefits of preventive medicine, only 45% of American adults typically get a flu shot during flu season. Vaccine hesitancy is particularly common among Black and white lower socioeconomic status men, who don’t trust doctors and are skeptical of the benefits relative to the perceived risk. For Black Americans, this mistrust is…
Read MoreImplicit Organizational Bias: Mental Health Treatment Culture and Norms as Barriers to Engaging with Diversity
Introduction BIPOC communities face many structural barriers to accessing mental health care. To reduce this health disparity and better serve multicultural populations, many providers are turning to person-centered care. Person-centered care is intended to improve quality of care by centering the patient’s values, preferences, and goals in collaboratively designed care plans. Although this approach has…
Read MoreA decade of studying implicit racial/ethnic bias in healthcare providers using the implicit association test
Introduction Existing research indicates that Black, Indigenous, and people of color have worse health outcomes than white people, including incidence, prevalence, severity of disease at diagnosis, rates of mortality, and lower quality of care, despite efforts to close these gaps. The health disparity gap begins at birth and persists throughout one’s life course. Though these…
Read MorePhysician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns
Introduction Prior research has documented that sharing demographic characteristics increases a sense of understanding or empathy between two people. This in-group bias has been found to influence the decisions made by leadership teams, inspection enforcers, teachers, and judges to favor those with shared racial or gender traits (further exasperated by white racial power). Greenwood, Hardeman,…
Read MoreStructural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality
Introduction Medical professionals recognize that physicians must learn both the science of medicine and the art of patient communication. Currently, much of the medical field is focused on the concept of “cultural competency” and “cultural humility.” These concepts have pushed medical education to move beyond “colorblindness” and recognize that social factors, such as race, ethnicity,…
Read MoreDissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations
Introduction Obermeyer et al. note both the growing attention to potential racial and gender biases within algorithms and the difficulty of obtaining access to real world algorithms – including the raw data used to design and train them – in order to understand how and why bias could appear in them. This study is important…
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