What the study found was that major U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, have some of the most racially segregated hospitals in the country. And many metropolitan areas have a high proportion of hospitals at each end of the inclusivity rankings (most inclusive versus least inclusive).
“Typically what we see is that some ZIP codes contribute a lot more to a hospital or other ZIP codes inside that perimeter contribute far fewer,” said Saini. “Some ZIP codes contribute none at all.”
One of the goals of the Lown Institute’s Hospital Index is to invite stakeholders to create a health care system that doesn’t look so segregated, Saini said, “where people go where they go because they made a choice. [Where] it’s not just about their income or their insurance or the color of their skin or the neighborhood they live in. And we’re a long way from that.”
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This cross-sectional study examines the number and location of vaccination sites across 18 districts with varying racial and ethnic demographic characteristics in Brooklyn, New York.
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Value-based payment models may exacerbate racial health disparities. To change this, we need to make equity a part of value -- and reward hospitals for advancing equity.
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The burden of COVID-19 in the United States has fallen disproportionately on Black and Hispanic/Latino individuals.
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The ideas, research, and actions from across Harvard University aimed at creating equitable opportunities for success and prosperity.
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After matriculating into medical school in the fall of 2013, I was drowning. It seemed that who I was—a Black, gay man—could not exist within the medical system.
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A policy adopted by physicians, residents, and medical students at the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Special Meeting of its House of Delegates (HOD) opposes “excited delirium” as a medical diagnosis and warns against the use of certain pharmacological interventions solely for a law enforcement purpose without a legitimate medical reason.
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The AMA's new push to grapple with health equity highlights a growing consciousness. And it's complicated.
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In 2021, the Lown Institute, an independent think tank, released a ranking system for U.S. hospitals’ on the degree to which they are adequately caring for the lower income and patients of color. Sadly, only two Atlanta metro area hospitals ranked in the top 100 for racial inclusivity, Grady Memorial Hospital and Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center and Emory University Hospital Midtown. This is likely a function of their location in downtown Atlanta rather than an actual strategy to address racial inclusivity and health equity.
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When estimating how well a patient’s kidneys are working, doctors frequently turn to an equation that depends on a question: Is the patient Black?
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The covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges facing rural health care, such as lack of broadband internet access and limited public transportation. For much of the vaccine rollout, those barriers have made it difficult for providers, like community health centers, to get shots into the arms of their patients.
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“Hospitals reside in communities and are part of communities. Our view is they shouldn’t just serve a community, they should genuinely be part of a community,” said Vikas Saini, a physician and president of the Lown Institute. “A lot of the contemporary rankings that look at reputation or mortality, surgical complications, don’t capture that dimension. We set out to create a lens through which to view the hospital system that’s different.”
“It’s not that Black people aren’t getting hospital care — they are — but for every hospital that’s tilted one way, there’s another that’s tilted the other,” Saini said.
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It’s called the “history of present illness,” or HPI, and it often includes a patient’s race—which is more likely to detract from care than to improve it
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A new study challenges the conventional wisdom on why many doctors refuse to take Medicaid patients.
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The lack of paid sick leave for all disproportionately impacts women and exacerbates the disparities they already face in the workplace.
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Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Some of them look to Black doctors for a sense of safety and connection, while medical schools add anti-racism training.
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The Lown Institute's report is yet another effort in a series of recent attempts to quantify and rank health care organizations' progress on achieving health equity. The authors delivered a bold and necessary message: Hospitals across the U.S. are racially segregated—that is to say, their Medicare patients' racial demographics don't match the demographics in their surrounding communities. These results might come as a shock to some—especially for those working at hospitals near the bottom of the list. But this data shouldn't be surprising.
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A new tool called the Health Equity Tracker collects, analyzes, and makes visible data on health disparities entrenched in U.S. medicine.
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This Medical News feature examines racial and ethnic disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of cystic fibrosis.
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