Patient and Provider Concordance

BACKGROUND: Understanding whether patients' preferences for physicians are influenced by racial or ethnic concordance is crucial for balancing patient care satisfaction and health care workforce diversity. OBJECTIVES: To investigate whether patients' preferences for physicians are influenced by racial or ethnic concordance and whether these preferences are reflected in the availability of physicians by race. RESEARCH DESIGN: A patient-focused randomized online experiment was conducted to evaluate preferences for physicians while a physician-focused randomized field experiment was conducted to evaluate physician availability by race. The patient-focused experiment involved respondents selecting primary care physicians, while the physician-focused field experiment was conducted on a random sample of primary care physicians in Texas, which reports physician race. RESULTS: White respondents preferred White physicians by 10 percentage points (ppts) (95% CI: 0.048-0.157, P