The majority of Medicaid-administered care organizations have modified or abandoned algorithms, policies or models that they identify as racially biased, according to survey results published by the Medicaid Innovation Institute. Dad on Friday.
The institute found that 88% of Medicaid carriers modified their health management tools to remove biases that negatively affected the health of people of color in the year before the survey. Health insurers including Kaiser Permanente, Centene and UnitedHealthcare are also gathering more information about their policyholders, including race, ethnicity, language, and social factors in the data. whether health.
The efforts go hand in hand. Insurers hope to use the data to address health disparities and identify when their own algorithms and models could exacerbate them.
Aetna, CareSource, Elevance Health, Humana, Independence Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, UCare and UnitedHealthcare, which administer Medicaid programs in various states, did not respond to or decline requests for interviews.
According to an earlier report jointly published by Independence Blue Cross and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, insurance companies’ health management tools do not consider structural racism in their machine learning models.
Early intervention models are often not based on race and socioeconomic status, the report said, which can delay care and exacerbate inequality. For example, drug adherence patterns using medical history data reflect disparities in diagnosis, treatment and prescribing between black and white patients, the researchers found. The result is a tool that disproportionately identifies Black patients as “non-compliant” when the real cause may be poor access to care.
“Health plans and other organizations that develop and use drug adherence models must recognize systemic biases in accessing pharmacies and prescription drugs, prescribing patterns and its use in black and brown communities influences problem formulation, algorithm development and interpretation, and intervention strategies”. Independence Blue Cross-MIT report says.
The report concludes that increasing the amount and type of patient data available to insurers could improve these tools. Insurers are preparing to categorize claims data by race and ethnicity to identify inequities between groups.
Insurers are also trying to better understand the barriers their members face to health and expect cooperation from government and community organisations. According to the survey, 90% of managed care organizations said their state Medicaid programs should improve data sharing between foster care agencies and the criminal justice system, and another 86% want more information from community groups.
Developing partnerships with community organizations can increase access to data on barriers to health, said Karen Dale, director of diversity, equity and inclusion at AmeriHealth Caritas. during the Medicaid Innovation Institute discussion Friday. Insurers should use that data to target interventions, then get feedback on the outcomes from all stakeholders, she said.
“We should do the job,” Dale said. “It’s all about who we serve and increasing their chances of being healthy.”
Regulations governing the algorithms and artificial intelligence tools of insurance companies are in their infancy. For example, the Food and Drug Administration recently announced it would review medical devices for evidence of bias and unfairness. On Wednesday, an FDA advisory panel met to evaluate pulse oximeters, which may overestimate oxygen levels in patients with dark skin.
