Talking Systems – Network interventions to reduce race and gender bias in medicine

About the session:

Race and gender bias in medicine is a persistent cause of healthcare disparities. Here, we investigate the potential of a peer-network approach based on “collective intelligence” to reduce bias in medical treatment decisions.

This conversation hinges around a research project which found significant disparities in treatment recommendations amongst a group of clinicians. The work found that an intervention in terms of structured peer networks showed remarkable improvement in the quality in their clinical decisions, resulting in the complete elimination of treatment disparities between patients.

It is argued that these findings offer a new generation of network interventions might be used in healthcare settings to reduce significant disparities in patient treatment.

About the speaker:

Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

Damon is one of the world’s leading scholars on social networks and behavior change. His work has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019.  He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN, among other outlets.  Damon’s speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Apple, Cigna, General Motors, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry’s, the U.S. Army, and the NBA, among others. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions(PUP 2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little Brown/Spark 2021).

Event details

Tuesday 6th December between 16:00 – 17:00
The event will be hosted virtually.

Book your place:

To book your place click here.

For further information please contact [email protected]