Linguistic Disparities in Access to Cancer Care

Patients seeking cancer care often have to call hospital call centers in order to be directed to the correct cancer center. In this project, we investigate whether differences in language of the caller and call center operator and availability of translators impact whether or not callers are given the right information to access the cancer care that they need.

The data in this study consists of cold-calls to hospitals with cancer centers in 12 states across the United States. Callers spoke English, Spanish, or Mandarin and attempted to gain information about 3 different cancer clinics and recorded success or failure.

I am responsible for performing the statistical analysis and interpretation for this project. This role includes data cleaning and data visualization. I was also responsible for determining the right analytic approaches given our research question. We are currently performing simple hypothesis testing and multivariable regression models. A manuscript is in the process of being written for publication.

Primary Investigator Dr. Debbie Chen

Advisor Dr. Mousumi Banerjee

_{University of Michigan, Michigan Medicine}