A study co-led by acting associate public health professor Ziad Obermeyer MD, finding that a software program commonly used in the health care industry is racially biased, has won the Editor's Pick award in the 2020 STAT Madness contest for the best innovations in science and medicine for the year. According to this reporter: "The artificial intelligence software equated health care spending with health, and it had a disturbing result: It routinely let healthier white patients into the programs ahead of black patients who were sicker and needed them more. ... It was one of the clearest demonstrations yet that some, and perhaps many, of the algorithms that guide the health care given to tens of millions of Americans unintentionally replicate the racial blind spots and even biases of their developers. ... The researchers didn't just publish their work and move on. Instead, they worked with the builders of the algorithm to fix it. And after hearing from insurers, hospitals, and others concerned that their algorithms, too, might be racially biased, they established an initiative at the Booth School to work pro bono with health systems and others to remedy that." For more on this study, see our press release at Berkeley News.