Press Release

Do No Harm Files Lawsuit Against Penn Medicine for Discriminatory Directory

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • March 18, 2025
  • University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

RICHMOND, VA; March 18, 2025 – Today, Do No Harm filed a lawsuit against Penn Medicine, the Consortium of DEI Health Educators, and WURD Radio for their discriminatory physician directory that excludes doctors based on race. 

Penn Medicine, the Consortium of DEI Health Educators, and WURD Radio operate the Black Doctors Directory, an advertising and marketing opportunity provided exclusively to black doctors in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Non-black doctors are excluded from the Directory regardless of how regularly they treat black patients or how much they have worked to improve black patients’ health.

The Directory is founded on the false premise that racial concordance, in which patients are treated by physicians of the same race, improves health outcomes. This ideology sows distrust between doctors and patients. Do No Harm has debunked this false belief in its report, Racial Concordance in Medicine: The Return of Segregation.

The Directory violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which bans racial discrimination in federally funded health programs.

Do No Harm is filing the lawsuit on behalf of one of its members who is excluded from the Directory based on race, even though they regularly treat black patients in southeastern Pennsylvania.

“The Black Doctors Directory is yet another example of Penn Medicine and other institutions prioritizing identity politics over care,” said Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Chairman of Do No Harm. “It is both wrong and a gross misuse of taxpayer money to exclude doctors from the Directory’s advertising advantages just because they are not black. Furthermore, the Directory’s foundational claim that racial concordance produces better health outcomes has been thoroughly debunked. If Penn Medicine and others wants to improve health outcomes for patients, then it would advertise and recommend the highest quality doctors, regardless of their race.”

Click here to read the lawsuit.

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. With 16,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 14 countries, DNH has achieved over 10,000 media hits in top-tier publications and garnered widespread attention through numerous broadcast news appearances.