In the USA almost all medical practices use standard EMR software from a small number of vendors. Epic EMR is one popular example.
There are some valid medical reasons to know the patient’s race or ethnicity, but IMO it’s mostly about metrics, data harvesting, statistical analysis, etc. There is a lot of money in data, and it’s cheap to store data points like race or ethnicity in a cloud database. And it’s cheap to punch down on workers and make them collect it from patients.
Sometimes this data is used for studies, but that’s not the prime motivating factor. Data = money. Data = job justification. Race is just one data point of many. I won’t speculate on all the things they could use it for, but there is little doubt they want it. They always ask at any provider I have ever been to.
In the USA, there are a frightening number of middle layer business entities that are basically rent-seekers who drive up the cost of health care. These entities are invisible to most of our population, and they like it that way. This network of entities is very complicated and boring (which is a good way to hide evil). A couple of easy examples would include PBMs and PSAOs. Not everything they do is useless but they are also a kind of tautology: we think we need them because we already have them in place.
Lina Khan was trying to clean some of this shit up, but then the Big Stupid of 2024 happened.
In the USA almost all medical practices use standard EMR software from a small number of vendors. Epic EMR is one popular example.
There are some valid medical reasons to know the patient’s race or ethnicity, but IMO it’s mostly about metrics, data harvesting, statistical analysis, etc. There is a lot of money in data, and it’s cheap to store data points like race or ethnicity in a cloud database. And it’s cheap to punch down on workers and make them collect it from patients.
Sometimes this data is used for studies, but that’s not the prime motivating factor. Data = money. Data = job justification. Race is just one data point of many. I won’t speculate on all the things they could use it for, but there is little doubt they want it. They always ask at any provider I have ever been to.
In the USA, there are a frightening number of middle layer business entities that are basically rent-seekers who drive up the cost of health care. These entities are invisible to most of our population, and they like it that way. This network of entities is very complicated and boring (which is a good way to hide evil). A couple of easy examples would include PBMs and PSAOs. Not everything they do is useless but they are also a kind of tautology: we think we need them because we already have them in place.
Lina Khan was trying to clean some of this shit up, but then the Big Stupid of 2024 happened.