Doctors are less likely to respond to Black patients, study finds

Researchers found patients belonging to minority groups were less likely to hear back from doctors on their patient portals.

If you're trying but failing to reach your doctor through a patient portal, your race may be at play.

That's the finding from a new study published in JAMA Network Open, which suggests patients who belong to minority racial and ethnic groups are less likely to receive a response from a physician. Instead, these patients will more likely hear back from nurses, which the study says insinuates a "lower prioritization during triaging."

Researchers came to this conclusion after examining the patient portal messages of 39,043 Boston Medical Center patients in 2021. After 11 months, their data showed the likelihood of receiving any response was similar regardless of race, but it was the type of health care professional responding that differed.

Namely, Black patients were nearly 4 percentage points less likely to get a response from an attending physician and about 3 percentage points more likely to hear from a registered nurse, the study shows. Asian and Hispanic patients saw similar but smaller results, with the former being 2.11 points less likely to receive a physician's response and the latter 2.32 points less, the study shows.

Meanwhile, White patients, being only 21.1% of the studied group, received 46.4% of all physician responses, the researchers said.