Physician Group Settles Suit Over Program for Black Doctors

Do No Harm, a healthcare professionals advocacy group, says it agreed to settle the challenge it brought against a physician-owned healthcare group’s leadership program for Black doctors.

The advocacy group argued Vituity’s Bridge to Brilliance program, meant to bridge opportunity gaps for historically marginalized groups, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Affordable Care Act. Do No Harm says it is made of a group of diverse healthcare professionals who want to protect the field from anti-racism ideologies.

Vituity said that it had already made the decision to end its incentive program for Black physicians in the parties’ joint stipulation of dismissal filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida on Jan. 2. Judge T. Kent Wetherell II dismissed the suit on Wednesday.

“Medical professionals should be hired on merit alone and medical organizations should abandon the divisive identity politics being used as the basis to implement the debunked theory of racial concordance,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the board chair of Do No Harm, said in a press release Wednesday. “Patients want and deserve the best doctors and the best medical care regardless of skin color or the racial makeup of their physician.”

Read more on Bloomberg Law.