Not Just A Number
Doctor’s treatment and death highlights yet another racial gap
By Fredrick McKissack
Of Fort Wayne Ink Spot
In Indiana, African Americans are 9 % of the population and have constituted 10% of the reported 8,663 COVID-19 deaths reported on Jan. 5.
One of those people was Dr. Susan Moore, an African American physician who videoed her final agonizing days from an Indiana University hospital in Carmel. Her death brought forward the plight of how her doctor, who is white, downplayed her physical misery from this disease.
Moore died on Dec. 20 at Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Carmel. She was 52. IU will conduct an internal review of the case.
Moore was at IU Health North because of complications from COVID-19 in early December. She posted a video to her Facebook page on Dec. 4 alleging she was treated “like a drug addict” by a white doctor when she asked for pain medication. Moore said she was told to go home when she asked to be transferred to another hospital.
“I put forth and I maintain if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that,” Moore said of her treatment at IU Health North.
“This is how Black people get killed,” she continued.
“I am deeply saddened by her death,” said IU Health CEO Dennis Murphy. “It hurt me personally to see a patient reach out via social media because they felt their care was inadequate and their personal needs were not being heard.”
IU’s review will be conducted by a diverse panel of health care and diversity experts to understand “not only the technical aspects of care, but also the more humanistic elements of the patient experience,” Murphy said. There is no timeline for the review. However, doctor’s around the country a calling for action.
“It’s had a huge impact,” said Dr. Christina Council, an African American primary care physician when talking to the New York Times about Dr. Moore’s experience. “Sometimes when we think about medical bias it seems so far removed. We can sit there and say, ‘OK, it can happen to someone that may be poorer.’ But when you actually see it happen to a colleague and you’re seeing her in the hospital bed and literally pleading for her life, it just hits a different way and really hits home and says, ‘Wow, we need to do something.’”
Implicit Bias
Unfortunately, Moore’s death highlights the problem of implicit bias in the medical community. An idea first posed in the 1970s, the theory of implicit bias posits that people may hold “negative nonconscious or automatic feelings and beliefs about others that can differ from their conscious attitudes,” according to a 2019 story on American Psychological Association’s site.
How this plays out, according to the story, can be seen in a 2016 study of black cancer patients and their physicians published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“[Providers] high in implicit bias were less supportive of and spent less time with their patients than providers low in implicit bias,” said the report’s authors. “And black patients picked up on those attitudes: They viewed high-implicit-bias physicians as less patient-centered than physicians low in this bias.” Implicit bias in healthcare can carry dire consequences—avoidable deaths. Black patients are 51% more likely to die in the emergency room than insured white patients. U.S. hospitals and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid spend about $270 billion each year on premature deaths and avoidable health costs as a result of biases and inequities.
Training Works, But…
Taking the long-term data-driven approach is exactly what was suggested by the authors of a 2017 Harvard Business Review article “Two Types of Diversity Training That Really Works.”
“A recent meta-analysis of over 40 years of diversity training evaluations showed that diversity training can work, especially when it targets awareness and skill development and occurs over a significant period of time,” according to the authors.
“Having an authority figure endorse the importance of diversity initiatives can enhance the effect of training for these individuals, in effect providing a means to appeal to and reach potentially resistant trainees.”
While IU’s Murphy has publicly shown his concern, the medical system’s legacy on this matter rests on how much importance the C-level executives continue to push to make sure that Dr. Moore’s treatment and death will be a starting point for better care going forward rather than a statistic in an awful year.
A gofundme page has been set up. She leaves behind a 19-year-old son and her parents who suffer from dementia. https://www.gofundme.com/f/dr-susan-moores-family-assistance