No distinction between ethnicity and race in MIMIC-IV

Prerequisites

• [ X] Put an X between the brackets on this line if you have done all of the following:
  • Checked the online documentation: https://mimic.mit.edu/
  • Checked that your issue isn't already addressed: https://github.com/MIT-LCP/mimic-code/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=

Description

When using MIMIC-IV as a source of validation data, my colleagues and I realized that there is no distinction between race and ethnicity in the admissions table of mimic_core.

We ran the follow query

select distinct ethnicity from mimic_core.admissions;

and received the following 8 distinct outputs

BLACK/AFRICAN
AMERICAN INDIAN/ALASKA NATIVE
UNABLE TO OBTAIN
ASIAN
OTHER
UNKNOWN
HISPANIC/LATINO
WHITE

We were wondering how others have dealt with the issue of no distinction between race and ethnicity. The guidelines from the US Census Bureau is to split ethnicity into hispanic/latino and not hispanic/latino:

https://www.cosb.us/home/showpublisheddocument/5935/637356700118370000.

However, the ethnicity variable in MIMIC-IV also contains what we commonly define as race (i.e. white, black, asian, american indian/alaska native). It would be great to get to the bottom of this as the demographics of MIMIC-IV are important for reporting, especially when comparing model performance across subpopulations to describe potential ethnic and racial disparities. There appear to be some subject_ids that have a race for one admission and an ethnicity for another admission, which further confuses reporting (example: subject_id==15743696).

Lastly, we are trying to figure out how others reconciled issues around multiple ethnicities being reported for the same subject_id for different hadm_ids. We understand that data are not always complete, but is it standard practice to report a specified race (i.e. BLACK/AFRICAN AMERICAN) rather than OTHER if a subject_id has at least one admission with the specified race?

Start with the MIMIC-IV online documentation and the mimic_core.admissions table definition, then review the distinct ethnicity values from the reported query and the subject_id 15743696 example. Determine whether the documentation needs clarification about race, ethnicity, and changes across admissions; done means the data definitions and reporting guidance are explicitly documented.