Radiology services are significantly harder to come by if you’re Black or Latino and living in the U.S., according to new research published Thursday in JAMA Oncology.
Adequate clinical resources are prerequisites to quality care, authors of the study noted. However, imaging options for these two demographics are concentrated in relatively few hospitals, which may lack the necessary manpower and capital to care for cancer patients.
UCLA researchers sought to better understand this issue, analyzing fee-for-service Medicare data related to race and ethnicity. They identified 10% of nonfederal acute care and cancer hospitals serving the highest share of Black or Hispanic patients. American Hospital Association survey data were then used to determine the availability of 34 different cancer-related services.
Relative to other hospitals, those serving racial and ethnic minorities had significantly lower odds of offering 7 of 12 diagnostic radiology exams (e.g., PET, with an odds ratio of 0.73). Same for all core cancer services (e.g., oncology at 0.51), 4 of 5 radiotherapy modalities, and 4 of 5 other treatment modalities (e.g., interventional radiology, 0.76).
“Disparities in cancer care resource availability likely reflect less funding for hospitals serving racial and ethnic minority groups and may affect between-hospital quality differences and hence race-based care disparities,” Gracie Himmelstein, MD, PhD, and Patricia A. Ganz, MD, with UCLA’s schools of medicine and public health, respectively, wrote Nov. 16. “Further work is needed to understand the interplay between these factors and the role of geographic, linguistic, and cost barriers as well as cultural beliefs and discrimination.”
Black and Latino patients also faced lower odds of having access to other imaging modalities including SPECT (0.51), PET-CT (0.55), multislice spiral CT with greater than 64 slices (0.61), and virtual colonoscopy (0.74). The study was limited by its reliance on Medicare data, which does not reflect all patients served, along with lack of information on actual cancer services used.
Read the full research letter in JAMA at the link below.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.