The unintended consequences of population health algorithms

KevinMD December 4, 2020
Betty Rabinowitz, MD

The results of a 2019 research article in the journal Science uncovered significant racial bias in commonly used population health algorithms used to identify and assign care to patients with complex, active health needs. Using a large clinical data set, the researchers showed that Black patients are considerably sicker than white patients at any given risk score. They demonstrated that remedying this disparity would more than double the percentage of Black patients receiving enriched services like care management (from 17 percent to over 46 percent).

The problem at the core of these results is that many of the algorithms used across the health care industry to predict risk, future utilization and cost, rely predominantly on data regarding the same patient’s...

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