Social Determinants of Health and Wellbeing

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

Introduction There is a large, consistent, and persistent gap in many different indicators of health status, across the lifespan, between Black and white populations. The author attempts to break this problem down to its root cause: first, the author notes that while it may be possible that there could be biological or genetic differences between…

Introduction This article addresses the growing public concern regarding the automation of racial discrimination through digital tools and technology. Throughout the paper, the author, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, focuses her discussion on a notable publication by Obermeyer et al. entitled, “Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations.” Unlike most researchers who…