The paper, Racial and Ethnic Disparities and Bias in the Evaluation and Reporting of Abusive Head Trauma, by Solutions Network cofund Kent Hymel, along with Antoinette L. Laskey, Kathryn R. Crowell, Ming Wang, Veronica Armijo-Garcia, Terra N. Frazier, Kelly S. Tieves, Robin Foster, and Kerri Weeks, was published in the Journal of Pediatrics online on March 29, 2018.
The study's goal was to characterize racial and ethnic disparities in the evaluation and reporting of suspected abusive head trauma (AHT) across the 18 participating sites of the Pediatric Brain Injury Research Network (PediBIRN). The researchers hypothesized that such disparities would be confirmed at multiple sites and occur more frequently in patients with a lower risk for AHT. In the PediBIRN study sample of 500 young, acutely head-injured patients hospitalized for intensive care, minority race/ethnicity patients were more frequently evaluated and reported for suspected AHT than white/non-Hispanic patients. These disparities occurred almost exclusively in lower risk patients, including those ultimately categorized as non-AHT or with an estimated AHT probability.