Guidelines on the use of race as patient identifiers in clinical presentations

The value of including race as part of the patient identifier in care and medical education has been a topic of debate among clinicians, medical educators, and sociologists.^1,2,6,7,8 The perceived benefit of using racial identifiers is that it may allow physicians to predict the risk of disease and inform drug therapy.⁹ This association is thought to be useful to medical students and trainees as they form their clinical knowledge base. However, there is a larger body of evidence that the use of race leads to bias and stereotyping by physicians. In many cases, patients are assigned to racial categorizations that are inconsistent with their self-reported identities.^1,15 It is unclear which medical schools have a policy that explicitly detail their stance on this topic. In this article, we propose a frame of thinking to guide medical educators as they develop policies on race as patient identifiers.