News, these counties also had lower disparities in mortality rates between Black and white residents. This longer life expectancy existed even in counties with a single Black physician.
Previous research has shown that when Black patients are treated by Black physicians, they are more satisfied with their health care, more likely to have received preventive care in the past year, and more likely to adhere to preventative services, such as blood tests and flu shots, STAT News reported.
Lisa Cooper, a primary care physician who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, told STAT News that the study is “groundbreaking” and “particularly timely given the declining life expectancy and increasing health disparities in the U.S. in recent years.”
She added: “These findings should serve as a wake-up call for health care leaders and policymakers.”
The study did not directly address why Black Americans face higher rates of chronic illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure, compared to their white counterparts. These health disparities include access to quality health care and health outcomes.
However, one proven way to address these inequities is by connecting Black Americans with doctors who look like them.
According to a study published in JAMA Network Open, Black people who live in areas with more Black primary doctors live longer, showing that increased diversity in the medical field can help mitigate racial health disparities.
The study has found that Black residents in counties with more Black physicians, regardless of whether they actually see those doctors, have lower mortality from all causes.
According to STAT, Black people fare better in counties with more Black physicians, earlier research suggests that “culturally concordant” medical care is of better and higher quality for patients, STAT News reported.
The study indicates that Black physicians are more likely to treat low-income and underinsured patients, taking on new Medicaid patients more than any other racial or ethnic group. Life expectancy improvements were greatest in counties with the highest poverty rates.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) analyzed the representation of Black primary care physicians within the country’s more than 3,000 counties during 2009, 2014, and 2019. They found that just over half of the nation’s counties had no Black primary care physicians at all.
In their analysis of the 1,618 counties with at least one Black primary care physician, they discovered that the more such physicians a county had, the higher the life expectancy for Black residents.
They hope to repeat the analysis to see how counties with Black doctors fared during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected people of color.
“That a single Black physician in a county can have an impact on an entire population’s mortality, it’s stunningly overwhelming,” wrote Monica Peek, a primary care physician and health equity researcher at UChicago Medicine. “It validates what people in health equity have been saying about all the ways Black physicians are important, but to see the impact at the population level is astonishing.”
According to STAT News, the study found that life expectancy increased by about one month for every 10 percent increase in Black primary care physicians. Although this may seem modest given the nearly six-year life expectancy gap between Black and white people, the authors noted that picking up such a signal on a population level is significant.
The study also found that every 10 percent increase in Black primary care physicians was associated with a 1.2 percent lower disparity in all-cause mortality between Black and white individuals.
“That gap between Black and white mortality is not changing,” said Dr. John Snyder, a lead author. “Arguably we’ve found a path forward for closing those disparities.”
