The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) will establish the “National Standard Implementation Plan for Medical Devices in 2023” to lead international standards and help domestic medical equipment makers advance overseas.



(Credit: Getty Images)


The main content of the implementation plan includes a push to win the final approval from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for two existing international standard plans suggested by Korea, three new international standard plans, and Korea’s hosting of international assemblies for electrical medical products, the agency said Wednesday.


“We are doing our best to ensure that medical device technology in which Korea has strengths can be enacted as the ISO standards,” the KDCA said.


The agency noted that it is continuously participating in ISO’s general assembly and working-group meetings and positively presenting its opinions so that ISO approves the two international standards in dentistry it had submitted this year, adding that it would suggest three new international standard plans this year to lead making international standards in medical devices.


More specifically, KDCA is promoting to get the ISO’s final nods for “general requirements for non-hinged dental handhelds” and “frontal apparatus – part 4: auxiliary apparatus” as international standards in dentistry. In addition, it will push to make three new standards — general requirements for hinged hand tools for dentistry,” “focused tube equipment – part 8: precision of electronic root tube length meter,” and the “classification of dental equipment and devices according to reprocessing – as international standards.


Besides, the agency is pushing to streamline 144 Korea Standards in various areas — 22 standards related to electric and electronic medical devices, 110 related to dental, surgical, and in vitro diagnostic areas, and 12 related to individual medical devices and those used by the vulnerable class.


Meanwhile, the agency plans to hold an international assembly of electric medical devices to be attended by about 150 experts from 20 countries in September to heighten Korea’s status in the international community regarding this field.


The international meetings planned by the agency are the general assembly of the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) and its technological group, TC (Technical Committee) 62, which deals with electric and mechanical safety, risk management, validation, and data security.


In these meetings, participants will discuss and decide on making and revising international standards regarding electrical medical products’ safety and essential function, including diagnostic imaging devices and radiation devices, the agency said.


“We will communicate with relevant experts based on regulatory expertise and maintain national standards (KS) continuously to ensure that the public can use high-quality medical devices with confirmed safety and high performance,” the KDCA said. “In addition, by reflecting Korea’s strong technical standards in the field of medical devices in international standards, we will actively support to enhance the status of the domestic medical device industry and help K-medical devices advance into overseas markets.
Integrating NVIDIA Technologies Into Medtronic’s Authentic-Time AI Endoscopy Machine to Assist Enhance Affected person Treatment and Results
GTC—NVIDIA nowadays announced that it is collaborating with Medtronic, the world’s major health care technological innovation provider, to speed up the improvement of AI in the healthcare procedure and bring new AI-dependent alternatives into affected individual care.
The companies will combine NVIDIA healthcare and edge AI systems into Medtronic’s GI Genius™ clever endoscopy module, created and manufactured by Cosmo Prescribed drugs. GI Genius is the very first Food and drug administration-cleared, AI-assisted colonoscopy resource to aid physicians detect polyps that can direct to colorectal cancer.
GI Genius has been built to host a suite of AI algorithms and integrating the NVIDIA Clara™ health care platform could let Medtronic to scale progress of algorithms for authentic-time processes, perhaps accelerating AI innovation for far better affected individual care.
“Artificial intelligence is a impressive software that can improve the velocity, performance and effectiveness of international overall health devices,” explained Kimberly Powell, vice president of health care at NVIDIA. “We’re collaborating with Medtronic to speed up AI innovation by enabling a software program-outlined business product, with the objective of increasing scientific decision earning, reducing professional medical variability and driving improved affected individual results.”
“We think that collaborating with AI providers and developers like NVIDIA and Cosmo is necessary to driving innovation within the health care product business,” stated Giovanni Di Napoli, president of Gastrointestinal Small business at Medtronic. “We are committed to functioning with the ideal and brightest minds in the subject of AI to acquire new systems that can increase client results and remodel the way we technique healthcare.”
Medtronic intends to combine NVIDIA Holoscan — a actual-time AI computing application system for making clinical devices — and NVIDIA IGX, an industrial-grade edge AI hardware platform, to run with its GI Genius AI-assisted colonoscopy method to help medical professionals with AI-enhanced diagnostic photos. Holoscan will help deliver the most current AI purposes into clinical options by delivering the entire-stack infrastructure necessary for scalable, application-defined processing of streaming info at the edge.
The NVIDIA Holoscan and IGX system helps make program-outlined healthcare devices feasible by enabling builders to successfully teach and validate AI styles in just the Cosmo Innovation Centre, and then host the AI-driven applications on Medtronic’s GI Genius AI Access™ Platform, a market for application-as-a-healthcare-machine (SaMD) purposes.
The to start with GI Genius units developed with the NVIDIA know-how will be offered later this yr.
In this job interview, Information Clinical speaks to Brian Anthony, co-director of MIT’s Professional medical Digital Product Realization Middle, about the impact equipment finding out and sensor systems have experienced on healthcare system engineering, as properly asthe Bioprocess Information Analytics and Machine Discoveringprogram he co-potential customers at MIT.
You should can you introduce yourself and inform us about your qualifications in health care engineering and clinical gadgets?
I am Brian Anthony, and I am a Principal Study Scientist at MIT’s Institute of Health care Engineering & Science and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. I am an skilled in sensor systems, anything from novel sensors to the knowledge analytics made use of to monitor and manage these techniques.
It turns out that there are a great deal of parallels between the medical requires of monitoring folks and the desires of checking and producing. I straddle the two realms, seeking at producing good analytics.
Prior to coming back again to MIT, I begun and sold a couple of distinctive companies, concentrating on product or service style and instrumentation. I educate several different classes at MIT, equally in manufacturing techniques and in imaging and machine mastering used to bodily systems.
You are the co-director of MIT’s Medical Digital Unit Realization Middle. Can you convey to us about the center’s work within just sector and investigate, as very well as the center’s ambitions?
Charlie Sodini, Joel Voldman, and I begun the MEDRC in excess of 15 many years ago. At the MEDRC, we begun with the recognition that, to do this kind of research, you will need to provide together the health care machine organization, the clinicians, and the reducing-edge study that is answering the queries both on the sensor or the device discovering side. We can speedily get technological innovation piloted at MIT, deployed into the area hospitals, and have data that guides points past the scale of what you can do in the tutorial setting.
The MEDRC is now aspect of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). IMES is a crosscutting section at MIT, with faculty from all diverse departments fascinated in utilized exploration in human subjects and medical technologies. We assistance aid connections to medical product businesses and pharmaceutical providers interested in employing or developing new technologies in the progress of drugs or the execution of medical trials.
You are one of the lead instructors on the MIT “Bioprocess Knowledge Analytics and Equipment Learning” study course. What matters do you deal with for the duration of the class, who attends, and what knowledge gaps do the study course fill?
I am involved in 3 classes Bioprocess Details Analytics and Equipment Learning, Sensible Production: Transferring from Static to Dynamic Producing Operations, and Industrial Net of Factors: From Principle to Programs. All three are broadly in details analytics in various sectors, irrespective of whether in agriculture, drugs or medical gadgets, natural environment, or even manufacturing and design and style.
Picture Credit score: Den Rise/Shutterstock.com
The bioprocess class is incredibly considerably focused towards the chemical engineer. It is derived from a course that Richard Braatz and I train at MIT referred to as System Analytics, which targets the chemical or mechanical engineer who may have a standard knowing of issues like statistical system control or primary comments command. But, in the existing period, irrespective of whether it be from multidimensional details, meaning cameras, or searching at novel manage techniques, there are a good deal of prospects that individuals are not taking advantage of in either their very first careers coming out of graduate faculty or undergraduate or what gurus are not using benefit of now.
One of the strategies that equipment finding out has altered gadgets is that it has changed the definition or expanded the definition of what a machine is.
This course exposes people to scenario scientific studies and elementary principle. All the things from principal part examination by means of to clustering, supervised and unsupervised understanding, but ultimately constructing on a sound foundation of the context of chemical engineering, bioreactors, and bioprocessing.
We want people who take section in the system to make sure that they have a potent appreciation for how data analytics historically has been applied and can be used and grown in manufacturing biotherapeutics.
The healthcare product market is economically enormous, but also noticeably impacts human health and medical science. How have recent innovations in data and sensor technologies ultimately impacted health-related products and imaging units?
1 factor of our work we’re very intrigued in is investigating how you aid medical doctors. For example, we have accomplished work in ultrasound the place we insert cameras and pressure sensors to the exterior of ultrasound probes. We do that so that when a health practitioner is attaining an ultrasound impression, and they’re keeping the ultrasound probe in get in touch with with the person’s physique and moving it close to, you can obtain more information about how you are attaining the data, what is the orientation and position of the probe with regard to the overall body, or what is the force that is staying used.
That additional details can be made use of to give better information to the health care provider, to give them much more exact dimensional reconstructions of your ultrasound data, or to extract further product properties or tissue homes out of the impression. Or, equally, to help them if they are not as trained as a different clinician.
I consider we have attained the point, absolutely via the pandemic, where you will find now a powerful recognition of the gain of the sensors that we can deploy into the home or onto folks. We’re observing medical trials getting enabled by shipping off trial know-how in a box.
1 of the large concerns related with wearables is compliance with remembering to don the gadget. We are fascinated in ambient sensors, so placing know-how into the house as element of the flooring, walls, and ceiling to be able to get physiological information in a non-get hold of way. Radar can give you heart and respiration costs, and the system serves as a mirror to radar.
Impression Credit: PopTika/Shutterstock.com
For illustration, Katie Hahm, a doctoral scholar who just concluded her Ph.D. with me, place accelerometers onto the corners of a room’s flooring. From the accelerometer information, she extracted clinically related biomarkers connected with gait and strolling. Gait is a general overall strong indicator of your wellbeing and wellness. Receiving that info conveniently in the residence usually means you do not have to stress about someone forgetting to have on the engineering.
How essential is it to permit folks to track their individual vitals and empower them to consider their health and fitness-monitoring into their possess arms?
I think significantly, that’s a lot more and a lot more vital. If we can get the technologies into the residence value-properly, we can shift the curve appreciably and deal with some of the inequities in healthcare, both in the US and around the world. In those far more rural environments, I think there is a moral imperative to empower the personal with the equipment to robustly get this facts, share it with their caregiver, and be energetic contributors in their individual well being.
Well being informatics is a person of the swiftest-escalating areas in overall health. How has info and the subsequent examination of that information revolutionized the structure and growth of health care products and solutions?
I believe 10 yrs in the past, there was much more of a hesitancy from the scientific industry experts to know how to use this sort of knowledge. The COVID-19 pandemic designed evident and clear the added benefits of knowledge obtained in the context of day-to-day living.
As we glimpse at details analytics, just one of the appealing possibilities is the affected person-centered technique to treatment, both equally in the clinic and at dwelling. These systems make it possible for us to likely ease the health-related treatment load in classic environments. It permits for the likely serving of populations that have been underserved by proliferating technological innovation out to them in a way that they can use it. Now we can get high-top quality facts in clinical environments that don’t have all the instrumentation that a significant medical center would.
Episodically, any one measurement may perhaps be noisy. Even now, the simple fact that you happen to be in a position to acquire this knowledge about time now helps make it more attainable for a caregiver to customise care centered on how you might be evolving at week or month intervals.
What are the up coming actions for you and your get the job done? Do you have any remarkable initiatives coming up?
Pertaining to manufacturing and medical biomanufacturing, we continue on to do a whole lot of function and active deployment with corporations to reply the question, “how do we include device learning procedures in serious-time to guide in true-time?
We carry on to operate within just the area of ambient sensors. We are deploying sensors into floors, partitions, ceilings, and the items you interact with in your household, like the doorknobs. So, all this information and facts that is generally lost, like your grip power and your gait, can be captured.
We printed a paper on the first thoroughly non-make contact with laser ultrasound process just before the pandemic. Lasers mild can be utilised to create seem. This has been identified and practiced in the non-destructive tests market for a prolonged time. If you consider a pulse laser and you glow that laser on to a metal, that pulsating of light will be regionally absorbed and turn into a sound wave that propagates. Each individual time you strike it with a very little pulse of gentle, a audio wave will propagate into the medium, hit off boundaries, and arrive back again.
Utilizing light, I can get audio established in a materials and then detect how that audio is propagated and bounced back to the provider. We’re able to do that now on humans. Applying light-weight, we shown the era of an ultrasound image from two meters away. We go on to exploration in that area, in which ultrasound is great because it truly is non-ionizing and fundamentally secure.
The place can visitors uncover a lot more data?
About Brian Anthony
Dr. Anthony is Director of MIT’s Master of Engineering in Manufacturing Method, Co-Director of the Clinical Electronic System Realization Middle, Associate Director, MIT.nano and direct instructor at MIT Expert Training. With about 25 years experience in merchandise realization—Dr. Anthony received an Emmy (from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) in broadcast specialized innovation—Dr. Anthony layouts instruments and tactics to keep an eye on and manage physical devices. His perform will involve techniques evaluation and style and design and contacting upon mechanical, electrical, and optical engineering, along with laptop science and optimization, to make methods.
The concentrate of Dr. Anthony’s study is in computational instrumentation—the layout of instruments and strategies to measure and control complicated physical units. His analysis includes the development of instrumentation and measurement remedies for production methods and medical diagnostics and imaging devices. In addition to his academic function, he has intensive practical experience in marketplace-pushed technologies innovation, merchandise realization, and business entrepreneurship and commercialization at the intersection concerning data engineering and innovative manufacturing. His teaching interests consist of the modeling of large-scale units in a huge wide variety of choice-generating domains and the advancement of optimization algorithms and software for examining and building this kind of methods. He has considerable practical experience in industry-driven technologies innovation as well as company entrepreneurship.
By means of the Health care Exploration Upcoming Fund, just about 200 ground-breaking healthcare research projects will share in far more than $382 million in grants, together with extra than $32 million to enhance To start with Nations wellness.
The assignments will aid Australia’s fantastic professional medical researchers, which include clinician researchers, learn new techniques to diagnose, deal with and treatment for people today with a wide variety of health and fitness circumstances. They will also assist early and mid-career researchers and give more Australians entry to clinical trials.
Investigation assignments on cardiovascular disease, major and preventive well being care, respiratory health conditions, maternal well being, mental wellbeing and To start with Nations health and fitness, will get funding to development essential perform.
Two ground breaking Initially Nations-led assignments to receive funding are:
College of Newcastle – $2. million–Gulibaa (Coolamon) Challenge. This will be a co-made product of treatment supporting Aboriginal moms across NSW to be smoke-cost-free in being pregnant and further than. The task will co-style and design, embed in Aboriginal Group Controlled Overall health Providers, and assess a group-based mostly smoking cessation method.
The Sax Institute – $1.5 million–Balanced Ageing for Aboriginal individuals. This job will evaluate the implementation and uptake of prevention courses to aid wholesome ageing among Aboriginal persons. The Institute will collaborate with Aboriginal Community Managed Health Expert services which run holistic and culturally risk-free preventive wholesome ageing programs for their communities.
Of the 193 assignments funded, 19 grants value far more than $32.3 million are relevant to Initial Nations well being and a more 13 grants value far more than $16.9 million are associated to mental health.
“I’m so pleased to announce that almost $400 million in funding will aid Australia’s researchers remedy the health and fitness difficulties which problem our local community.”
“This funding is about strengthening opportunities for Australian well being and professional medical analysis. It will enable commercialise proof-of-principles, and deepen worldwide exploration ties now and in the long term.”
“As the Albanese Governing administration renews the focus on Closing the Gap, it is well timed that significant exploration funding will handle overall health troubles that are important to the overall health of our First Nations persons.”
Estimates attributable to Assistant Minister McCarthy:
“The Australian Federal government will get the job done each individual working day to Near the Hole for Initially Nations persons and these cutting-edge investigate jobs will support make a significant variation.
“Working alongside proficient and skilled researchers offers these types of an essential opportunity to uncover remedies to complex health problems in the city, cities and the bush.
“Support for the Healthier Ageing for Aboriginal Persons venture is an important expense in comprehending how to aid and treatment for our elders.
“The expenditure in two, ground breaking Initial Nations-led initiatives together with pregnant moms and elders is a testament of our dedication to see a more healthy way of life, from start to aged age.”
The us is beholden to individuals who supply us. Institutions from the navy to hospitals depend on imports from a broad assortment of nations, and not all of them are welcoming. Relying on non-allied international locations for significant merchandise tends to make us vulnerable. We can only make improvements to that reality with bipartisan collaboration it is really what introduced a Tennessee Republican and a Democrat from California with each other.
The pandemic showed us how tough and gradual it is to reorganize complex intercontinental provide chains. Think about how substantially even worse the circumstance would be in the course of an armed conflict, and you are going to get started to comprehend our newest nationwide security disaster.
The reasons for the crisis aren’t sophisticated. Like any other purchaser, the United States governing administration seems to be for the most stable, most affordable-value suppliers. Sad to say, this has established an overreliance on goods like medical materials produced in nations, mainly China, that could weaponize the incredibly offer chains that sustain us.
The escalating stress in between the United States and China has introduced that vulnerability into sharp aid. If Americans’ accessibility to critical clinical and pharmaceutical supplies were abruptly interrupted, our countrywide stability would be in serious jeopardy.
The United States will have to fortify its existence sciences provide chain by shifting it to nations with whom we share far more amicable relations and strategic alignment. This method will entail turning diplomatic achievement into solid financial associations, and a promising possibility has just lately opened up.
Workers generate antigen test kits for the Covid-19 coronavirus at a factory in Nantong, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province on December 19, 2022. STR/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Brokered by the United States, the Abraham Accords recognized peaceful associations involving our strong ally, Israel, and a variety of Arab states in the Center East and North Africa. Health care innovation and financial development have adopted scorching on the heels of these watershed agreements, and we are well positioned to notice the added benefits as effectively.
If The usa pursues this bipartisan friendshoring option, the initially stage would entail the establishment of an Fda bureau in the Middle East. By generating a staging ground there, we diversify our offshore professional medical and lifetime sciences supply chain although shifting our dependence absent from China.
The two Israel and the United Arab Emirates have strong biopharmaceutical industries that make them natural allies in the United States’ quest to safeguard its entry to crucial health-related products that are now predominantly created in China.
These allies also boast reducing-edge health-related engineering, investigate, and enhancement. With the Food and drug administration in their community to expedite regulatory assessments and partnerships, People would appreciate expanded accessibility to lifesaving medical systems whilst accelerating pioneering health care and biomedical technologies.
It would also direct to the producing of higher-demand health care products for sale in the U.S. like biopharmaceuticals, clinical gadgets, diagnostics, and nutraceuticals.
We need to have to get started this course of action as quickly as achievable, due to the fact we have a large hill to climb.
As of now, lively pharmaceutical ingredients imported from China comprise about 90 {bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of the American offer of lifetime-preserving antibiotics like penicillin, azithromycin and cephalosporins. It should also be famous that in 2019, China was liable for 95 {bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of the United States’ imports of ibuprofen, 91 p.c of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of acetaminophen, 40–45 {bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of penicillin, and 40 {bf0515afdcaddba073662ceb89fbb62b6b1bf123143c0e06b788e1946e8c353f} of heparin.
That similar yr, a report by an Food and drug administration-commissioned task drive claimed that drug shortages are a persistent trouble and are hard to resolve, often long lasting for decades.
A main obstacle is that we have no in depth list of every single biopharmaceutical product created in China and imported by the U.S. The suspicious absence of this essential record begs the thoughts: Who is hiding what, and why? Whose accountability is it to sustain accountability for this crucial source chain inventory?
If China have been to inflict even a small stoppage on the United States, the American population and armed forces would locate by themselves acutely susceptible and unprepared.
Friendshoring some of our pharmaceutical requirements to the Abraham Accords international locations, like Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, will make America safer.
This friendshoring collaboration will not absolutely take care of America’s dependence on China, but noteworthy precedents have already been set. The Countrywide Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 provided the “Expanding Healthcare Partnerships with Israel to Reduce Dependence on China Act,” which authorizes $4,000,000 per year to help collaborative existence sciences analysis.
We see our condition as a massive bipartisan possibility to fortify our countrywide protection though rising America’s accessibility to innovation and cutting-edge professional medical technology—but the clock is ticking rapidly.
Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA) who serves on the Committee on Money Services and Rep. Diane Harshbarger (R-TN) who serves on the Electrical power and Commerce Committee not long ago returned from a USIEA bipartisan Congressional tour to Israel.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ very own.
The leading U.S. medical journal, read regularly by doctors of all specialties, systematically ignores an equally reputable and rigorous body of medical research that focuses on Black Americans’ health.
The American Medical Association created a segregated “whites only” environment more than 100 years ago to prohibit Black physicians from joining their ranks. This exclusionary and racist policy prompted the creation in 1895 of the National Medical Association, a professional membership group that supported African American physicians and the patients they served. Today, the NMA represents more than 30,000 medical professionals.
In 2008, the AMA publicly apologized and pledged to right the wrongs that were done through decades of racism within its organization. Yet our research shows that despite that public reckoning 15 years ago, the opinion column of the AMA’s leading medical journal does not reflect the research and editorial contributions by NMA members.
Invisibility in the opinion column of one of the most prominent medical journals in the U.S. is another form of subtle racism that continues to lessen the importance of equitable medical care and health issues for Black and underserved communities.
Our research began with a question: Has the AMA’s 2008 apology had any effect on the frequency with which JAMA opinion writers draw on insights and research of JNMA scholars and authors?
Medical publications like JNMA and JAMA do not simply convey knowledge. They also establish professional community values through the topics that are studied and who is credited for ideas related to research. When writers choose to reference or cite another scholar, they are acknowledging and highlighting that expertise.
As such, citations play an important role in the visibility of research. Articles and authors with more citations are more likely to have a greater effect on the scientific community and patient care. Opinion pieces can shape the broader conversation among medical professionals, and citations can widen that circle of communication.
Invisible racism
We traced how frequently JAMA and JNMA opinion writers referenced one another from 2008 to 2021 by reviewing the 117 opinion pieces published in JNMA and 1,425 published in JAMA during this 13-year period. We found that JAMA opinion columns have continued to, in effect, uphold racial bias and segregation by ignoring JNMA findings.
Even when focusing on race, racism and health disparities, topics that JNMA has explored in great detail, JAMA opinion columns did not reference JNMA colleagues or research. Only two JNMA articles were credited and referenced in the 1,425 JAMA opinion pieces that we reviewed.
Editors at JAMA did not respond to our requests for their comments on our analysis.
Racial equity in medicine
The story of the AMA and NMA is not only a reminder of the racist history of medicine. It demonstrates how the expertise of Black professionals and researchers continues to be ignored today. The lack of JNMA citations in JAMA research undercuts the AMA’s own work on racial equity and potentially compromises the quality of medical knowledge published in its journals.
For example, a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that scientists from underrepresented groups innovate, or contribute novel scientific findings, at a higher rate than those from majority groups.
An article published in the weekly medical journal of the Public Library of Science noted that diverse research teams are often more successful in developing new knowledge to help treat women and underrepresented patients with greater precision.
Dissolving systemic bias
One way to intentionally tackle racial bias and segregation in medical knowledge is by deliberately referencing Black researchers and their work. To change this dynamic of racial bias, medical journals must pay attention to how much and how often the Black medical establishment is referenced. Health issues in underserved communities would likely become more visible and achieve greater quality of care in keeping with the AMA’s commitment to social justice.
Journal editors could tell writers and editorial staff to prioritize citation practices. Individual authors might conduct research and evaluate their reading habits to intentionally include research from the Black medical community.
However, this work must go beyond individuals. Undoing decades of collective habits and embedded racism requires collaborations that work across systems, institutions and disciplines.
Racial disparities in health care often result in lower-quality medical treatment and worse health care outcomes for Black Americans. Towfiqu Barbhuiya for Unsplash, CC BY-ND
For example, libraries, databases, and search engines that help researchers find and evaluate medical publications might review today’s research tools. It is hard to contribute to a research conversation if your work is invisible or can’t be found.
Many tools, like impact factors, rank research according to how influential it is. If research begins in a category of less importance, it can be harder for the technology to rank it equitably. JNMA’s work was already marginalized when the tools that rank research were developed.
Thus, search results can hinder efforts of individual authors to work toward equitable citation practices. Black researchers and their research of Black health were excluded from the beginning, and existing systems of sharing knowledge and drawing attention to important studies incorporate that structural racism.
The AMA apology in 2008 and its recent progress on addressing racism in its publication process are promising steps. Influential medical journals serve to inform and shape health care. Who is referenced in these journals matters to the medical establishment, research funders and, ultimately, to the patients that are served by innovations in medicine.
Attention to citation can help reduce systemic bias in medical knowledge to achieve greater fairness in health care and, in the long run, help increase attention and resources that will help solve health issues in underserved communities.