breaking down barriers to care with people who care.

Embracing technologies that put the clinic wherever the patient is.

Helping health care systems keep pace,

pushing every boundary, till there's room for every patient.

Better health, brighter future.

That's the Decadeaway. Have you ever gone to the doctor's office and felt like they were judging you maybe even

before you got around to talking to them?

Unfortunately, that's probably a pretty common feeling,

and it's not because doctors are trying to be jerks.

Like all humans, doctors have unconscious biases that can lead them to make unfair judgment calls.

But those biases can pose a serious risk to their patient's health.

For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.

And I'm joined today by Dr. Christina Gonzalez. She's a professor of medicine and population

health and associate director at the Institute for Excellence in Health Equity at

NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Christina, can I call you Christina? Yes.

Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

Let's start with a basic question.

What is implicit bias?

So implicit bias refers to the unconscious and unintentional mental associations that we make about others,

often along lines of personal identity factors like race or religion or gender,

but they're unconscious and unintentional.

How much does that tend to come up in a clinical setting and why does it matter?

...