Gaps in Measuring and Mitigating Implicit Bias in Healthcare

Author: Sally Arif

Publisher: National Library of Medicine

Publication Year: 2021

Summary: The following article focusses on how recent studies have shown that healthcare providers hold unconscious bias through the use of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT was developed in 1998 and is the now the most readily available computerized online tool used to measure and bring awareness to unconscious bias in published literature. Current research shows that use of the IAT in conjunction with facilitated discussions on bias may be a more useful technique in dispelling bias than using the IAT alone (Stone and Moskowitz, 2011; Hagiwara et al., 2020). One study examined how the use of IATs followed by facilitated discussion impacted emergency medicine residents’ views on their own implicit bias (Zeidan et al., 2018).