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Every patient-physician relationship is unique. But some research shows that a patient's race can be a particularly strong indicator of how successful some relationships are in achieving treatment goals.

This was true for diabetes patients at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, according to a recent report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In reviewing the charts of 4,556 white patients and 2,258 black patients treated by 90 physicians, researchers found that black patients often had worse outcomes than white patients.

Black patients were less likely to achieve control of several health indicators, including cholesterol levels and hemoglobin counts. Researchers found that 57 percent of white patients, for example, were able to control their cholesterol, while only 45 percent of black patients did so; 47 percent of whites and 39 percent of blacks achieved optimal hemoglobin levels.

Thomas Sequist, a primary care physician at Harvard Vanguard and the study's lead author, said he and his team wanted to pinpoint specific areas of minority care in need of improvement. They found that racial discrepancies in treatments applied to doctors across the board. Almost all saw worse treatment outcomes with their black patients than with their white patients.