Dear Colleagues,
The Management Science community congratulates Kartik K. Ganju , Hilal Atasoy , Jeffery McCullough, and Brad Greenwood whose recent Management Science paper "The Role of Decision Support Systems in Attenuating Racial Biases in Healthcare Delivery" was chosen as a finalist in the prestigious Research Award of the National Institute for Healthcare Management. Other finalists include papers published in the Journal of Political Economy, The New England Journal of Medicine, the Review of Economic Studies and the American Journal of Health Economics. The Research Award recognizes outstanding published work from researchers furthering innovation in health care financing, delivery and organization or the implementation of health care policy. For more information, see Research Award Finalists (nihcm.org)
The Management Science paper makes a significant contribution to the challenge of racial bias, often of an unconscious nature, in health service delivery. The authors show that clinical decision support systems (CDSS) can significantly reduce racial bias.
Specifically, the study matches information on the adoption of hospital CDSS with data on 36,000 patients from California, Florida, and Maryland with severe diabetes. Included are only patients whose diabetes led to circulatory complications that required either the amputation of a limb or a revascularization procedure, such as angioplasty, that can save the limb. Prior work has already established that there is a significant disparity in amputation rates between black and white patients. This paper shows that the difference in amputation rates reduces significantly after the adoption of CDSS, more than halving the gap in amputation rates between black and white patients.
The work makes a significant contribution to healthcare management and adds to the wider debate on how information technology affects racial discrimination, by providing evidence that decision support systems can attenuate racial bias.
David Simchi-Levi
Editor-in-Chief
Management Science
E-mail: mseic@mit.edu
Reference:
Ganju K. K., H. Atasoy, J. McCullough and B. Greenwood (2020). "The Role of Decision Support Systems in Attenuating Racial Biases in Healthcare Delivery." Management Science, Vol. 66, No. 11, November 2020, pp. 5171–5181.
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David Simchi-Levi
Professor of Engineering Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA
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