Medicare AI Will Infer Race to Close Health Equity Gap

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will use artificial intelligence to derive a patient’s race using factors like name, ZIP code, and language preference, when the patient’s race is not fully disclosed on hospital forms, to help spot and improve on health-care inequities.

The CMS thinks the computer-estimated data, from two algorithms developed by independent contractors, would be a closer match to what respondents might have self-reported if they were given more races and ethnicities to select from as their response. The de-identified data will be shared with hospitals, which already use information on race to identify risk factors ...