An essential medical device fails people of color. A clinic is suing to fix that

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Inaccurate pulse oximeter readings are more common in Black patients than non-Black ones. It was a problem that could be ignored — until COVID-19 hit.

Roots Community Health Center was slammed in 2020, with lines for its COVID-19 testing stations stretching around the block and exam rooms full of people struggling to breathe. Patient after patient at the East Oakland clinic extended their fingers so that healthcare workers could clip on a pulse oximeter, a device that measures the degree to which red blood cells are saturated with oxygen. For healthy people, a normal 'pulse ox' reading is typically between 95% and 100%.

Then Sjoding came across an article by Amy Moran-Thomas, a medical anthropologist at MIT. After spending sleepless nights monitoring her husband’s pulse oximeter readings as he suffered through COVID, Moran-Thomas began digging into the history of the device. She found the 1990 paper that noted hypoxic Black patients were more likely to get deceptively high readings.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

 

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