Widely used health care algorithm that helps determine which patients need additional attention was found to have a significant racial bias, research says.
“The risk is that biased algorithms end up perpetuating all the biases that we currently have in our health care systems,” said Ziad Obermeyer, an acting associate professor at the Berkeley School of Public Health who was the lead researcher on the study. “It furthers the vicious cycles that we all want to break.”The algorithm used heath costs to predict and rank which patients would benefit the most from additional care designed to help them stay on medications or out of the hospital.
Patients above the 97th percentile were marked as high-risk and automatically enrolled in the health program, yet the black patients had 26.3 percent more chronic health conditions than equally ranked white patients. “We already know that the health care system disproportionately mismanages and mistreats black patients and other people of color,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “If you build those biases into the algorithms and don’t deal with it, you’re going to make those biases more pervasive and more systematic and people won’t even know where they are coming from.”
Optum’s algorithm harbored this undetected bias despite its intentional exclusion of race. This is because inequity is baked into algorithms when they’re built on biased data, Jha said.
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