Reducing Racial Disparities through Experience: Evidence from Medical Device Choice in Cardiac Catherization Labs

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# Reducing Racial Disparities through Experience: Evidence from Medical Device Choice in Cardiac Catherization Labs
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## Presenter: Chad Stecher, Arizona State University
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### Discussant: Ian McCarthy, Emory University and NBER
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### ASHEcon Annual Meeting, June 28, 2022
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# Racial disparities in health care
- Lower life expectancy of more than 4 years for non-Hispanic Black Americans versus White Americans
- More than 6 years in 2020
- What can health care policy do to shrink this gap?
  - **Outright discrimination**
  - **Implicit bias**

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This paper (I think) can speak to this decomposition
  
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# This paper
*Main Question*: Does experience with Black patients reduce the racial gap in DES use?

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*Approach*: LPM regression of DES use (separately by race) against different measures of experience

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Unique data on team construction!

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# Some high-level thoughts

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# Learning differentially by race?
- Other evidence that physicians learn differentially by the race of the patient?
- Consistent with implicit bias, but haven't seen in a learning context
  - Maybe related to Sarsons, **Interpreting Signals in the Labor Market: Evidence from Medical Referrals**
- Role of implicit bias could work in different directions, depending on strength of priors and early experience

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# Who is learning?
- Hard to think about team learning in this context
- Specialist seems to make the decision of whether to use DES