Jazmin Evans was waiting on dialysis for four years before finally, on the Fourth of July last year, she received a kidney transplant. “Now I say the fireworks are for me,” said Evans, who was diagnosed with kidney disease when she was 17.
She would have been waiting even longer had it not been for a shift, in 2021, in the way that physicians calculate kidney function for Black patients like her.
In a panel Wednesday at the STAT Summit, Evans, who advocates for equity in health care and organ transplant systems, joined two experts in the use of race-based clinical algorithms. They discussed the work that led race to be removed from a commonly-used calculator to estimate patients’ kidney function, and the challenges facing similar efforts to address race-based algorithms in other areas of medicine. The topic was a subject of STAT’s investigative series Embedded Bias, coauthored by moderator Usha Lee McFarling and this reporter.
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