Patients may give doctors higher ‘experience’ ratings when they’re seen by doctors of the same racial or ethnic background — and lower ratings when their backgrounds differ, a US study suggests.

Researchers examined care provider ratings from almost 117,600 surveys completed by patients within the University of Pennsylvania Health System between 2014 and 2017.

The primary outcome was the “likelihood of your recommending this care provider to others”, which was scored by researchers based on whether doctors received the maximum rating of 5 or a rating of less than 5.

Overall, doctors received maximum ratings in 88% of the racially and ethnically concordant doctor/patient pairs, compared with 82% of discordant doctor/patient pairs, the study found.