A race-based test for kidney function is finally changing. What about the rest of medicine?
Oct. 17, 2024
Health Tech Correspondent
Jazmin Evans was waiting on dialysis for four years before finally, on the Fourth of July last year, she received a kidney transplant. “Now I say the fireworks are for me,” said Evans, who was diagnosed with kidney disease when she was 17.
She would have been waiting even longer had it not been for a shift, in 2021, in the way that physicians calculate kidney function for Black patients like her.
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In a panel Wednesday at the STAT Summit, Evans, who advocates for equity in health care and organ transplant systems, joined two experts in the use of race-based clinical algorithms. They discussed the work that led race to be removed from a commonly-used calculator to estimate patients’ kidney function, and the challenges facing similar efforts to address race-based algorithms in other areas of medicine. The topic was a subject of STAT’s investigative series Embedded Bias, coauthored by moderator Usha Lee McFarling and this reporter.
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