One expert says these findings should be a call to action for hospitals and physicians.
The Urban Institute, which is funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, looked at differences in Black and White patient safety measures among adults receiving inpatient care in 26 states.
Care quality was measured by the rate of preventable adverse hospital patient safety events per 1,000 at-risk discharges using data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
Researchers compared experience by race on 11 patient safety indicators – four related to general patient safety, and seven linked to risk of adverse events with surgical procedures.
Surgical risk differences significant
The gaps were widest surrounding surgical care. Black patients were 7.9 percentage points more likely to be in a hospital considered low quality across all surgical safety measures. They were 4.9 percentage points more likely to be admitted to a hospital considered low quality across all general safety indicators.
“If you’re a Black patient getting surgery – relative to a White patient – in my study, you were 25% less likely to be in a hospital that prevented hemorrhage during surgery; you were 26% less likely to be in a hospital that prevented postoperative respiratory failure; and you were more than 30% less likely to be in a hospital that is effective in preventing postoperative sepsis,” Anuj Gangopadhyaya, PhD, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, said in an interview.
According to the report, Black patients were also 31.9% less likely than were White patients to be admitted into hospitals considered high quality in preventing pressure ulcers and 22.8% less likely to be in a hospital good at preventing iatrogenic pneumothorax.
Dr. Gangopadhyaya said this may be the first study to compare the numbers after the inception of the Affordable Care Act. These data were collected in 2017, 3 years after the core elements of the ACA kicked in.
He said that although the ACA has done much to narrow the racial gap in terms of insurance coverage, it has not been effective in reducing the heightened safety risk to Black patients in the hospital.
‘Shocking, though not surprising’
Uché Blackstock, MD, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity in New York City, called the findings “shocking, though not surprising.”
Though these data were collected before COVID-19, the pandemic has exposed profound racial inequities, she noted.
She cited the example of Susan Moore, MD, a Black physician in Carmel, Ind., who died from COVID-19 at age 52 in December after experiencing what she said was systemic racism in her care.
“We saw in the death of Dr. Susan Moore that even having a formal education and being a physician is not protective for Black patients. These findings only reaffirm what we already know – that Black patients receive worse and lower-quality care than White patients,” Dr. Blackstock said in an interview.
“These findings are not a result of Black patients’ individual choices as is often suggested, but rather the results of a health care system that has devalued the lives of Black patients and inherently provides poorer quality of care to them.”
Dr. Blackstock said this report represents a call to action.
Health care institutions must, she said, “look inward at the intentional and critical antiracism work that must be done on provider, organizational, and systems levels by allocating the necessary resources, continuing to track disaggregated health metrics, and committing to structural change within health care systems.”