ABSTRACT
A widely used algorithm that predicts which patients will benefit from extra medical care dramatically underestimates the health needs of the sickest Black patients, amplifying long-standing racial disparities in medicine, researchers have found. Correcting the bias would more than double the number of Black patients flagged as at risk of complicated medical needs within the health system the researchers studied, and they are already working with Optum on a fix. Machines increasingly make decisions that affect human life, and big organizations—particularly in health care—are trying to leverage massive data sets to improve how they operate. Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, drew a parallel to the way Henrietta Lacks, a young African American mother with cervical cancer, was treated by the medical system.
