Targeting Clinical Encounter-Level Factors May Close Disparities In Access To COVID-19 Treatment, Study Suggests

MedPage Today (7/1, Rudd) reports a study suggests that “barriers such as limited access to clinicians and home tests may drive a substantial share of racial and ethnic disparities in access to COVID-19 treatments.” Researchers observed that “among over 200,000 patients with positive COVID test results from a single healthcare system, unadjusted rates for prescriptions for oral antivirals were 10.8 percentage points lower for Black patients and 9.8 percentage points lower for Latino patients compared with white patients.” But in an analysis “adjusting for clinical, public health, and treatment timing covariates, these differences dropped to a 3.3-percentage-point difference between Black and white patients and a 0.7-percentage-point difference between Latino and white patients.” Researchers suggested that “solutions that target clinical encounter-level factors – over which clinicians and health systems have greater control than deeper socioeconomic structural barriers – could help close these treatment gaps.” The study was published in JAMA Network Open.