FDA's promised rules on pulse oximeters unlikely to end decades of racial bias
CBSN
Oakland, California — The patient was in his 60s, an African American man with emphysema. The oximeter placed on his fingertip registered well above the 88% blood oxygen saturation level that signals an urgent risk of organ failure and death.
Yet his doctor, Noha Aboelata, believed the patient was sicker than the device showed. So she sent him for a lab test, which confirmed her suspicion that he needed supplemental oxygen at home.
Months later, in December 2020, Aboelata thought back to her patient as she read a New England Journal of Medicine article showing that pulse oximeters were three times as likely to miss dangerously low blood oxygen levels in Black patients as in white ones. At a time when Black Americans were dying of COVID at high rates and hospitals struggled to find beds and oxygen for those needing them, the finding exposed one of the most blatant examples of institutional racism in American health care.
