The Washington Post: Racial bias in a medical algorithm favors white patients over sicker black patients

A widely used algorithm that predicts which patients will benefit from extra medical care dramatically underestimates the health needs of the sickest Black patients, amplifying long-standing racial disparities in medicine, researchers have found.

The problem was caught in an algorithm sold by a leading health services company, called Optum, to guide care decision-making for millions of people. But the same issue almost certainly exists in other tools used by other private companies, nonprofit health systems and government agencies to manage the health care of about 200 million people in the United States each year, the scientists reported in the journal Science.