February 2022 | Racism & Health

One large Massachusetts health system has ambitious plans for how it can become an antiracist institution.

Research related to racism and health has evolved in recent decades, with a growing appreciation of the centrality of the social determinants of health, life-course approaches and structural racism, and other upstream factors as drivers of health ...

Racism is not always conscious, explicit, or readily visible—often it is systemic and structural. Systemic and structural racism are forms of racism that are pervasively and deeply embedded in systems, laws, written or unwritten policies, and entrenched ...

Antiracist health policy research requires methodological innovation that creates equity-centered and antiracist solutions to health inequities by centering the complexities and insidiousness of structural racism. The development of effective health ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated and amplified the harsh reality of health inequities experienced by racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States. Members of these groups have disproportionately been infected and died from COVID-19, yet ...

Few studies have illustrated how racism influences Black women’s use of reproductive health care services. This article presents findings of a collaborative study conducted by a research team and a reproductive justice organization to understand Black ...

Little is known about how racism and bias may be communicated in the medical record. This study used machine learning to analyze electronic health records (EHRs) from an urban academic medical center and to investigate whether providers’ use of negative ...

As the use of machine learning algorithms in health care continues to expand, there are growing concerns about equity, fairness, and bias in the ways in which machine learning models are developed and used in clinical and business decisions. We present a ...

Theoretical research suggests that racialized felony disenfranchisement—a form of structural racism—is likely to undermine the health of Black people, yet empirical studies on the topic are scant. We used administrative data on disproportionate felony ...

The disproportionate rates of police surveillance and encounters in many communities in the US may be contributing to inequities in health and violence. Frequent policing in communities, which may often also be aggressive policing, has been associated ...

Examining how spatial access to health care varies across geography is key to documenting structural inequalities in the United States. In this article and the accompanying StoryMap, our team identified ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) with the largest ...

Patients receiving home health services from high-quality home health agencies often experience fewer adverse outcomes (for example, hospitalizations) than patients receiving services from low-quality agencies. Using administrative data from 2016 and ...

Medicaid managed care enrollees who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups have historically reported worse care experiences than White enrollees. Few recent studies have identified disparities within and between Medicaid managed care plans. ...

The objective of this study was to describe how structural racism and sexism shape the employment trajectories of Black women in the US health care system. Using data from the American Community Survey, we found that Black women are more overrepresented ...

Recent events have amplified the debilitating effects of systemic racism on the health of the United States. In an effort to improve population health and dismantle more than 400 years of racial injustice, retrospective examinations of policies, practices,...

Structural racism toward American Indians and Alaska Natives is found in nearly every policy regarding and action taken toward that population since non-Natives made first contact with the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Generations of American ...

Within the monolithic racial category of “Asian American,” health determinants are often hidden within each subgroup’s complex histories of indigeneity, colonialism, migration, culture, and socio-political systems. Although racism is typically framed to ...

The Asian American health narrative reflects a long history of structural racism in the US and the complex interplay of racialized history, immigrant patterns, and policies regarding Asians in the US. Yet owing to systematic issues in data collection ...

Shalon Irving’s 2017 death brought national attention to maternal mortality among Black women in the US. This essay remembers her life and legacy.