Critical Data Literacy: Addressing race as a variable in a preclinical medical education session

Background: Librarians provide instruction to medical students throughout their first and second years of preclinical medical education. This poster examines the development of teaching materials to support librarian-led instruction in critical data literacy, clinical algorithms, and the inclusion of race as a variable in risk calculators.

Description: Race is a social construct and a poor proxy for genetic differences. However, race is used in clinical calculators.
Librarians provide an informatics session introducing the Framingham Study, later cohort studies, and the Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease (ASCVD) Risk Calculator to first-year medical students. This calculator includes race as an input and over or underestimates risk for certain groups. With the goal of fostering critical conversations about the use of race as a variable in research and practice, teaching materials were enhanced with descriptions of the cohort populations on which the calculator is based and the calculator development process. Librarian instructors were provided with pre-session materials describing problems with race-based medicine. A pre-session discussion and post-session debrief with librarian instructors were used to evaluate the usefulness of the updated teaching manual, slides, and supplementary readings.

Conclusion: Revisions were made to teaching materials for a librarian-led informatics session. Librarian instructors were provided with talking points and key questions to encourage medical students to be critical data consumers and critical users of clinical algorithms. The session was delivered to approximately 200 students across 14 WebEx sessions, lasting 50 minutes.