Removing race adjustment from lung test could mean higher disability payments for Black vets
DBMI's Arjun Manrai and his study in the New England Journal of Medicine are mentioned in STAT
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Excerpt:
Removing a patient’s race from an equation used to assess lung function — a change called for by health equity advocates — would mean that the lung disease of nearly half a million Black Americans would be reclassified as being more severe, and that Black veterans could receive more than $1 billion in additional disability payments, according to a study published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The issue of how race is used in clinical algorithms has become a topic of widespread discussion, and controversy, in recent years, and the American Thoracic Society is among many medical societies that have been grappling with the issue. Last year it said that a racial correction may contribute to health disparities in lung disease and should no longer be used, but it called for more research on the downstream effect of such changes.
The new paper, which is being presented during the society’s annual meeting in San Diego, is an attempt to quantify those effects.
The study’s senior author, Raj Manrai, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, said he hoped the results would help prepare clinicians and health systems for the large number of patients whose lung disease status may change as a result of new race-free equations. Pulmonary function labs in hospitals, the authors said, may need to build more capacity and be prepared for a possible increase in patient volume as more patients require follow-up lung testing.