April 4, 2025 Story by: Editor
A highly-referenced 2020 study that bolstered the concept of racial concordance—the idea that patients receive better care from doctors of the same race—may have excluded critical data that challenged its conclusion, according to findings from an open records investigation.
Led by Brad Greenwood, a business professor at George Mason University, the study claimed that “when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved.”
However, internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request suggest that a “key data point was edited out of the body of the paper, apparently because it muddled the downstream policy implications of the study,” according to a report by the Daily Caller.
The FOIA request was submitted by Do No Harm, a group critical of identity politics in healthcare. They shared the materials with the Daily Caller before public release.
According to an early, unpublished draft of the study, the researchers initially noted that white infants also had better outcomes when treated by physicians of the same race. The draft read: “White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a black physician than a white physician, implying a 22% fatality reduction from racial concordance.”
But Greenwood appeared to object to including that data point, writing in the document’s margin: “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative.”
Ian Kingsbury, director of research at Do No Harm, told the Daily Caller News Foundation: “That’s not how scientists speak. It’s not a smoking gun, but it’s certainly suggestive they were pushing one narrative or another.”
That data point was ultimately removed from the final version of the paper, which stated: “Concordance appears to bring little benefit for White newborns.” Still, the omitted information did appear in the study’s appendix, according to the investigation.
Additional emails reviewed during the investigation suggest Greenwood may have aimed for a specific conclusion—that a strong link exists between physician race and patient outcomes. One 2019 email from Greenwood to his co-authors stated:
“Good news – I caught my obligatory coding error, updated results are attached. Bad news- results are not as strong. We lose the effect when a physician fixed effect is included for newborns,” he wrote. “I think there is enough to tell a story here.”
The College Fix noted that neither Greenwood nor co-author Rachel Hardeman, a professor specializing in health and racial equity at the University of Minnesota, responded to inquiries about the report. The Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, where Hardeman works, also did not comment.
Despite these concerns, the 2020 study has garnered widespread attention. It was even cited by the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which ended affirmative action in college admissions in 2023.
However, the study’s findings were challenged last fall by Harvard professor George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen of the Manhattan Institute. As reported by The Fix, the pair revisited the original dataset and incorporated additional controls for infant birth weight. Their results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicated the study’s key claims did not hold up under scrutiny.
“The estimated racial concordance effect is substantially weakened, and often becomes statistically insignificant, after controlling for the impact of very low birth weights on mortality,” they concluded. Source: The College Fix
