Cleveland Clinic is being accused of illegally discriminating based on race by operating a program to prevent and treat strokes in minority patients, The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 14.
The system's minority stroke program began in 2019, and tailors treatment and prevention services to Black and Latino patients, including medical referrals and post-stroke care. Black men and women are at least two times as likely as white Americans to die from strokes.
Activist groups Do No Harm and Wisconsin Institute have filed a complaint with HHS claiming that "race discrimination is a defining feature" of the program. The complaint alleges that the hospital system is violating the Affordable Care Act and a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination by recipients of federal funds.
"Cleveland Clinic is not permitted to sort individuals and coordinate benefits on the basis of race according to whatever rationale it believes is appropriate however well-intentioned its misguided notions may be," the complaint said.
In the complaint, the Wisconsin Institute said unidentified members of Do No Harm "who are not members of racial or ethnic minorities" were affected by the discriminatory practices.
Hospital system spokesperson Andrea Pacetti told the Journal that Cleveland Clinic treats patients regardless of race, ethnicity or other characteristics as part of its mission to provide medical care and education and to conduct research.
The system is one of many with programs aimed at people of color in order to help improve patient outcomes and eliminate racial disparities. However, the groups behind the complaint said other components could explain health disparities, including environmental and other factors such as health insurance, income, bias and more.
"It undermines trust, it suggests there's two kinds of healthcare being delivered—there's healthcare being delivered to minorities, and there's healthcare being delivered to white people," Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Do No Harm's chairman and a retired physician and University of Pennsylvania kidney disease researcher, told the Journal. "Our mission is to get rid of discriminatory practice in medicine."
The allegations are some of the first to bring a fight against race-based programs into healthcare, arguing that providers can't use racial and ethnic demographics for treatment, preventive care or patient education.
"There's definitely a concerted effort to attack DEI in healthcare and medicine, but I haven't seen it done before over the way the actual provision of medical care is done," David Glasgow, executive director of New York City-based New York University School of Law's Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, told the Journal.
The HHS Office of Civil Rights will evaluate the complaint and could investigate.
"Our mission is to care for life, research for health and educate those we serve," Ms. Pacetti told Becker's. "Our job in fulfilling our mission is to care for all individuals across the communities we serve regardless of race, ethnicity, or other characteristics."
Similar cases have gone to court before. In 2022, New York was sued and successfully defended a directive that healthcare providers take race and ethnicity into account when distributing COVID-19 treatments.