Code Blue – UCSF Postdoc Slam 2023 3rd Place Winner, Chris Williams, MD

when you go to see your doctor for a health problem you expect to be treated in the same way regardless of the color of your skin yet we live in an inherently biased Society where examples of systemic racism often make Headline News bias policing strategies residential segregation unfair lending practices are but a few examples of this I remember when I first saw some of these headlines I was left thinking what other areas of my life may be affected by structural racism and what can I do about t

his here at UCSF I investigate whether this bus exists within our own Healthcare System I focus my attention on the emergency department which is typically the first place people go to when they have a serious medical problem and the origin of many of the downstream decisions and treatments that patients receive consequently it represents an ideal place in which to start looking for racial disparities in healthcare when patients come into the emergency department they are first triaged they will

have their blood pressure heart rate and other Vital Signs measured and they're given a score that dictates how urgently they should be seen this is known as the Acuity score in my research I investigate whether racial disparities exist in the assignment of Acuity scores during the emergency department triage process to do this I leveraged an unprecedented data set of 350 000 patients presenting to the emergency department I use an artificial intelligence technique called natural language proce

ssing to Cluster patient symptoms so that a fair comparison of patients presenting with different types of conditions could be made I additionally extracted a host of clinical and demographic details relating to each emergency department visit this was a hugely important step to ensure that all confounding variables are suitably accounted for I then created statistical models to examine where the black Hispanic and Asian patients are more likely to receive lower Acuity scores than white patients

what I discovered was both Illuminating and disheartening the data revealed that patients from racial and ethnic minority groups were significantly more likely to receive lower Acuity scores and be seen less urgently compared to their white counterparts this finding persisted regardless of various patient characteristics including patients age sex Vital Signs and presenting symptoms I plan to use these findings to delve deeper into the root causes of racial disparities where else in a patient's

care do these disparities exist and how do we develop effective strategies to tackle this inequity by doing this it is my hope that together we can work towards the future where everyone can go to see their doctor and be treated in the same way thank you thank you