Word in Black: Is The Patient Black? Check This Box for Yes

October 2025

Word in Black reporter Anissa Durham is an Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ)  U.S. Health Systems Reporting Fellow, who has focused her fellowship work on a series entitled “On Borrowed Time,” which explores the many challenges facing Black patients in need of organ transplants. The third installment of her series focuses on the role of race in clinical algorithms, and the way bias in data can have very real personal consequences. Durham shows readers how one young man’s struggle with dialysis is part of an historical arc of medical injustice and genetic misunderstanding that has led to poor health outcomes for far too many Black patients. Durham also explores what is happening now to reconsider the medical inaccuracies underlying algorithms that treat Black and white patients as biologically distinct – when in fact all human beings are genetically more than 99% the same.