The effect of physician-patient race-matching on women’s reproductive health

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 14. Research at the Intersection of Race and Health

Abstract

African American women in the United States are 3.4 times more likely to die during pregnancy,
2.3 times more likely to have a fetal loss, and 1.6 times more likely to have a preterm birth when compared with non-Hispanic White women. We use a population-wide dataset from New Jersey
with information on individual births, hospitals, and physicians for the years 1997 to 2011 to evaluate the potential effects of physician race/ethnicity matching that of their patients on racial disparities in maternal and infant health outcomes for a sample of non-Hispanic White and African American woman. Focusing of three maternal and three infant adverse pregnancy outcomes – preeclampsia, prolonged labor, maternal death, low birthweight, fetal distress and infant jaundice – we use logistic regression to model experiencing these outcomes against a rich level of individual factors. Our results provide support that the matching of physicians and patients race/ethnicity affects a subset of these conditions for both non-Hispanic White and
African American patients.

Authors

• Kinga Reka Makovi, New York University, Abu Dhabi

• Ka-yuet Liu, University of California-Los Angeles

• Angela Clague, University of California, Los Angeles

• Nancy Reichman, Rutgers University

• Julien Teitler, Columbia University

• Rayven Plaza, University of Texas at Austin