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Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) includes "equity" as one of six key domains of health care quality, yet equal treatment for Americans of all races and ethnic groups remains an incompletely realized goal. It has been 25 years since significant unexplained racial variation in the use of coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG) was noted in a single institution.1 Although this finding raised an alert, the medical community was skeptical, assuming that the data were anomalous or confounded. Since then, however,
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Dr. Peterson is a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology and associate vice-chair for quality at Duke University Medical Center and director of cardiovascular research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute — both in Durham, NC. Dr. Yancy is medical director of the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
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