Background: Racism is a public health crisis impacting patients and healthcare workers. Antiracist education is not typical in undergraduate or graduate medical education curriculum. Discriminatory practices in health care result in worse patient outcomes in Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC). Committing to antiracist work is the first step in addressing racism and must [...]

Background: Race and racism are social determinants of health resulting in marginalized groups often experiencing worse health outcomes. These racial differences are often due to physician bias as well as biased processes. To mitigate this, it is recommended that clinicians avoid reifying racial differences as biological differences. This study describes the use of racial identifiers [...]

Background: Hospitalists are core to the U.S. inpatient provider workforce and serve a central role in adults’ inpatient health system interactions. Over 11 million Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) [1] and 1 in 6 LGBTQ Americans describe facing discrimination in the medical setting [2]. To provide culturally responsive and clinically [...]

Background: Equity is an essential domain of healthcare quality [1] but is rarely addressed within quality measurement programs. Quality initiatives, without explicit equity focus, may exacerbate underlying disparities.[2]To address this historic lack of focus on equity, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) now provides confidential reports to hospitals on two disparity metrics for Medicare [...]

Background: Unconscious bias within the U.S. health care system has been linked with disparities in the treatment of patients by age, gender, and race (1). While many factors contribute to these disparities, implicit bias may play a significant role. Stigmatizing language often reflects the implicit bias that healthcare providers possess toward patients (2). Recent research [...]

Background: Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) comprise 19% of the adult population of California (1). Communication barriers between providers and patients with LEP contribute to health disparities and associate with increased adverse events (2,3). Working with professional interpreters associates with decreased hospital length-of-stay and readmission rates (4). However, few providers receive formal training on [...]

Background: Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color (BIPOC), other underrepresented minority (URM) individuals, and women have been historically underrepresented in scholarly writing and research. Junior faculty members may face similar experiential, psychological, and logistical barriers to scholarly participation. We sought interventions to improve hospitalists’ scholarly writing production, specifically those tailored for women, BIPOC, and other [...]

Background: It is well established that there is a persistent gender gap in promotion in academic medicine despite an equal number of male and female medical students for the past 20 years. Possible mediators of this gender gap include differences between men and women in years on faculty, measures of productivity such as number of [...]

Background: Disparities in health outcomes that differ by racial or ethnic group, religion, socioeconomic status, gender, age, mental health, ability, sexual orientation or gender identity, geographic location, or other characteristics historically linked to discrimination or exclusion demonstrate that equitable care in the United States is a goal that has not been achieved. Treating all patients [...]

Background: Stigmatizing language in clinical notes can negatively impact physician attitudes, propagate bias, affect prescribing behaviors, and exacerbate healthcare disparities, yet remains prevalent even in the Open Notes era. Prior analyses of stigmatizing terms in clinical notes are limited by the lack of context in which terms are used and multiple meanings of certain words [...]