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Is Your Physician Implicitly Biased? A Fifth Tuesday Follow-up to My New Year's Resolution :

March 29, 2016

Regular readers of Evidence eMended will recall my end of the year posting  on implicit bias in physicians. At that time, I explained implicit bias as ".. the unintended, somewhat submerged bias...

Regular readers of Evidence eMended will recall my end of the year posting on implicit bias in physicians. At that time, I explained implicit bias as ".. the unintended, somewhat submerged bias in all of us that can result in disparities in the health care we provide." I spoke about my early experiences with Project Implicit, a research site with testing aimed at helping us all recognize our own implicit biases, with the hope that this increased self-awareness will allow us to control our biases such that they don't interfere with good patient care. I also promised to follow up on this posting to tell you about my ongoing experiences with Project Implicit testing.

I haven't been as zealously devoted to taking a weekly bias test as I had planned, but by now I've completed several modules. I won't tell you my findings exactly, other than to say I haven't been overly surprised; I expected that, like many people, I had a modest degree of implicit bias in some areas. What I have been most pleased with, however, is the experience of going through the test modules. I can see how the researchers used the rapid response images to collect data on my recognition patterns, and I found myself very excited to complete each module and see how my floundering to categorize various images produces summary results.

In a sense, then, it's actually the process of interacting with the modules that has been helpful to me, and thus I remain very strong in my advice to readers to join me in the experience. It's never too late for New Year's resolutions - why not start now at Project Implicit!

Also, I do urge you to go back to my December 29 blog posting to look at the comment from Keyon Mitchell, a medical student at UC Davis who is pushing for implicit bias to become a staple in medical student education.

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