Addressing Healthcare Inequities Through Patient Relationships | Lisa Cooper, MD

Jul 4, 2023

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It’s no longer a surprise that the race and ethnicity of a patient influence their health outcomes. But back in the 1990s, when Lisa Cooper, MD first documented and published findings that supported the role of patient race on the quality of physician-patient interactions, these were groundbreaking, even radical ideas. Today, Dr. Cooper, a physician and social epidemiologist, is the Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity and a Bloomberg Distinguished professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She has designed innovative approaches to improve physician communication skills and the ability of healthcare organizations to address health disparities. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In this conversation, we discuss her international upbringing, implicit bias in medicine, what good physician-patient relationships look like, and how we can more effectively prepare doctors to create a more equitable future.

In this episode, you will hear about:

Dr. Cooper’s international upbringing and how an early understanding of privilege shaped her career path - 2:21
How privilege can change based on community and culture, and how Dr. Cooper experienced this shift - 7:25
The observations Dr. Cooper made early in her career that led her to study how race and class impacts health outcomes in America - 12:58
Facing stereotypes in a culture that is not your culture of origin - 18:44
How Dr. Cooper began her research on racial inequities in health and the findings from those initial studies - 26:48
The unrecognized assumptions that doctors are taught to make when it comes to patient care - 32:56
How physicians can learn to take better care of patients from all backgrounds - 38:36
The current state of medical education around implicit bias training and racial disparities - 46:40
Dr. Cooper’s advice to her younger self - 52:53

Dr. Cooper is the author of several highly-regarded medical research papers; in this episode we discussed Race, Gender, and Partnership in the Patient-Physician Relationship (1999), published by Journal of the American Medical Association.

You can follow Dr. Lisa Cooper on Twitter @LisaCooperMD.

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