A New Haven-backed state bill designed to protect Black patients from potentially inaccurate blood-oxygen readings advanced out of committee and towards the full state legislature for further debate.
That proposed legislation is Raised Senate Bill No. 1008: An Act Concerning Health Equity, The Coronavirus Pandemic And Pulse Oximeters.
The bill was introduced by New Haven State Rep. Pat Dillon, and is co-sponsored by fellow New Haven state lawmakers Martin Looney, Robyn Porter, and Juan Candelaria, as well as by Hamden’s Josh Elliott. Dillon also introduced a similar bill, House Bill 6241, which was co-sponsored by, among others, fellow New Haven State Rep. Toni Walker.
On Monday, the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Insurance and Real Estate moved the bill forward by unanimous consent.
“I’m really excited that the Insurance Committee unanimously supported the legislation,” Dillon told the Independent Tuesday. “It’s a modest step towards mitigating the systemic racism that we know exists” in healthcare, including in how pulse oximeters work.
A pulse oximeter is a medical device that clamps onto one’s finger and measures oxygen in the blood by passing light from the device through a patient’s skin.
“Because it is noninvasive and easy to obtain, it has been, for many, the go-to device for a quick estimate of severity of illness in aftercare and even in clinical settings,” Dillon wrote in testimony in support of the bill.
However, research has shown—and the federal Food and Drug Administration has conceded—that these devices are less accurate for patients with darker skin than they are for patients with lighter skin.
The proposed legislation would require the state inform health care providers and pharmacists across the state that “a pulse oximeter is more likely to produce an inaccurate blood oxygen level for an insured who is an individual of color as opposed to an insured who is a white individual.”
The bill would also prohibit insurers, health care centers, and other medical service operations from denying coverage for an otherwise covered benefit “if such denial is exclusively based on an insured’s blood oxygen level as measured by a pulse oximeter.”
Click here to read more about the bill, and watch the video below to hear Dillon talk about the legislation with WNHH FM host Babz Rawls-Ivy.
Technology and medicine need to be equally reliable and useful for everyone regardless of the color of their skin, their gender, or their ethnicity or race or any other variation that may effect the technology or medicine's proper use and results.