Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Maia Taft, MD, for her publication in American Academy of Pediatrics' Hospital Pediatrics titled “Equity in Receipt of a Lumbar Puncture for Febrile Infants at an Academic Center”. 
Taft and her team wanted to investigate if there was any association between self-identified race, insurance type, ZIP code-based median household income and receiving a guideline-concordant lumbar puncture (GCLP) in febrile infants to see if there was any structural racism or bias from physicians.
Their 3-year study included 965 infants and looked at febrile infants ≤60 days presenting to a children’s hospital between the years 2015 to 2017. GCLP was defined as obtaining or appropriately not obtaining a lumbar puncture as defined by the hospital’s clinical practice guideline, which recommended performing a lumbar puncture for all febrile infants ≤60 days of age unless an infant was >28 days of age and had respiratory syncytial virus-positive bronchiolitis.
Their study concluded that the factors of race, MHI, or insurance type did not come into play at any point, and they stress that physician awareness and ongoing assessment of the role of factors like race and socioeconomic status in the clinical evaluation and outcomes of febrile infants is critical.