Impact of healthcare algorithms on racial and ethnic disparities in health and healthcare (December 2023)

Summary

This systematic review conducted for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) aimed to examine the evidence on whether and how healthcare algorithms exacerbate, perpetuate or reduce racial and ethnic disparities in access to healthcare, quality of care and health outcomes. It also examined strategies that mitigate racial and ethnic bias in the development and use of algorithms.

The results showed that algorithms potentially perpetuate, exacerbate and sometimes reduce racial and ethnic disparities. Disparities were reduced when race and ethnicity were incorporated into an algorithm to intentionally tackle known racial and ethnic disparities in resource allocation (for example, kidney transplant allocation) or disparities in care (for example, prostate cancer screening that historically led to Black men receiving more low-yield biopsies).