The contested meanings of race and ethnicity in medical research: A case study of the DynaMed Point of Care tool

Sachil Singh and Valerie Steeves

Social Science & Medicine, 2020, vol. 265, issue C

Abstract: Although the use of race and ethnicity for diagnostic purposes remains a controversial practice given the socially contingent meaning of the terms (Bowker and Star, 1999), health researchers continue to report possible relationships between health outcomes and race/ethnicity in the literature. As summaries of these types of studies are incorporated into commercial databases designed to provide medical practitioners with actionable information, there is a risk that the algorithms that drive the databases may unintentionally incorporate racist biases (O’Neil, 2016) in search reports that use race and ethnicity as query terms to identify findings to help in the diagnosis and treatment of particular patients.

Keywords: Race; Ethnicity; Point of Care tools; DynaMed; Citation trail; Discrimination; Social sorting; Big data; Algorithms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113112

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