Health care disparities called medical error.(Practice Trends)

WASHINGTON -- Health care disparities among ethnic groups should be considered a form of medical error, James Gavin, M.D., said at a consensus conference on patient safety and medical system errors in diabetes and endocrinology.

"When we see disparities, that really is a reflection of inadequate patient safety," said Dr. Gavin, who is past president and professor of medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta. "It means that under the same or similar conditions of risk or exposure, the outcomes are sufficiently different that there is some disadvantage conferred on one of the other subject populations."

One example is coronary heart disease (CHD), he said at the conference, sponsored by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. "There is a real difference in CHD mortality in black males, compared with whites at every age stratum; it doesn't start to even out until you get to the ninth decade of life. I'd be very concerned about these kinds of numbers."

Results like these are in part a reflection of how medical decisions are made for different patients, and, sometimes, the only way to get at that information is by looking at surrogates for decision making, such as utilization rates, Dr. Gavin said.

For instance, coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) has proved to be of significant benefit in high-risk patients, and yet "CABG is significantly underutilized in blacks, compared with whites," he said. On the other hand, data on amputation among patients with diabetes "suggest it is significantly more utilized in blacks, compared with whites. Something is driving these outcomes."