# Geospatial Analysis of the Proportion of Persons Defined as Underrepresented in Medicine for Each Medical School and Their Surrounding Core-Based Statistical Area

## TL;DR

Medical schools often do not reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of their local communities, which could impact healthcare quality and address historical injustices.

## Contribution

This study introduces a geospatial approach to assess the demographic alignment between medical schools and their surrounding communities.

## Key findings

- Medical school enrollments generally do not reflect the demographics of their surrounding core-based statistical areas.
- There is a mismatch between the racial/ethnic composition of medical students and their local communities.
- The study highlights the need for more inclusive medical school admissions practices.

## Abstract

The current approach to increasing diversity in medical education fails to consider local community demographics when determining medical school matriculation.

We propose that medical schools better reflect their surrounding community, both because racially/ethnically concordant physicians have been shown to provide better care and to repair the historical and current racist impacts of these institutions that have criminalized, displaced, and excluded local Black and Brown communities.

In this study, we used geospatial analysis to determine that medical school enrollments generally fail to reflect their surrounding community, represented as their core-based statistical area, within which the individual medical schools reside.