The Color of Care: Race and Bias in Modern Medicine

For years, hospitals across the United States have quietly used race-based adjustments in medical calculations, influencing everything from kidney transplant eligibility to lung function assessments and childbirth risk. These formulas were built on outdated assumptions about biological differences between races, yet they continue to shape who gets treated, believed, and prioritized in the healthcare system.

In this lecture, Dr. Jennifer Tsai, emergency medicine physician and UC Berkeley public health educator, explores how race-based medical algorithms became embedded in modern healthcare and why many experts are now fighting to remove them.

Through real-world examples, she examines how a single number can delay treatment for Black patients, how bias becomes hidden inside “objective” medical tools, and what happens when we begin questioning the systems behind life-and-death decisions.

Speaker: Jennifer Tsai, Physician