The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
– Albert Einstein
Town Hall Talk
A talk I gave at Town Hall Seattle in 2024
Medical decisions are complicated and stressful. Decisions such as whether to pursue an elective surgery or whether to start a new cancer medication often come with serious consequences. Many decision support tools are now available to help patients and doctors make these decisions, increasingly powered by state-of-the-art big data and artificial intelligence technologies. Some of these tools include patients’ race and ethnicity as a decision factor. In this talk, I discussed the practice of including race as a decision factor for medical decision making and how this practice affects racial disparities.
Blog post on fairness and efficiency-equity tradeoffs
Some thoughts on incorporating our desires for fairness in healthcare policy in this blog post
and related article:
Khor S, Elsisi ZA, Carlson JJ. How Much Does the US Public Value Equity in Health? A Systematic Review. Value Health. 2023 Mar;26(3):418-426. doi: 10.1016/j.jval.2022.08.009. Epub 2022 Oct 8. PMID: 36216706.
Our work in the news…
In STAT News 2023:
Getting rid of bias in clinical calculators isn’t as simple as taking race out of the equation.
In Healio, 2023:
Omitting impact of race, ethnicity results in less accurate cancer risk prediction models
Medscape Medical News, 2023:
Race and Ethnicity in CRC Recurrence Risk Algorithms?
In HPC Live, 2023:
Removing Race and Ethnicity Worsens Algorithmic Fairness for Colorectal Cancer
Recurrence Risk
National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology News, 2023:
Addressing Racial and Ethnic Bias in Algorithms that Predict Colorectal Cancer Risk.
Thought piece on the promise and biases of algorithms in health economics and outcomes research
My earlier spotlight piece on the topic.
Sara Khor 