Benefit-Cost Analysis of Brief Intervention to Reduce College Alcohol Abuse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rationale: Excessive alcohol consumption among college students leads to serious consequences (e.g. fatal and non-fatal injuries, alcohol poisoning, blackouts, academic failures, violence, rape, assault, unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, property damage, and diminished job prospects). Brief alcohol interventions delivered by health care providers have a proven efficacy record, but the economic benefits among college students have not been compared to costs. Objective: Benefit-cost analysis of an ongoing NIH-funded randomized controlled trial of brief alcohol intervention (The CHIPS Project) for at-risk college drinkers at four US and one Canadian university. Methodology: Staff time, facilities, and material costs of screening and brief intervention are compared to reductions in costs of hospital care, emergency response, urgent care treatment and transportation to detoxification centers in the 6 months after randomization. Bootstrap analysis is conducted to form a benefit-cost ratio and confidence interval. Results: 12,900 students entering health services centers at the five participating sites were screened for at-risk alcohol consumption. 4,512 (35%) students screened positive for at-risk drinking, 2,090 completed a face-to-face baseline assessment interview and 986 were randomly assigned to the control or experimental arm of the study. The cost of screening and brief intervention was $106,900, or $217 per study patient. Screening costs accounted for 41% ($44,242) of the total cost with an average of 13.1 screenings per intervention subject enrolled. 24-month follow-up is ongoing, but 6-month results are reported here. At 6-months post-randomization, the hospital, emergency department, and urgent care costs of the intervention subjects was $614 per subject, compared to $491 per subject for controls. The benefit-cost ratio is negative. Conclusions: The CHIPS brief alcohol college intervention did not result in medical care utilization savings. Societal costs and benefits are left for further investigation. This is the first benefit-cost analysis of brief alcohol intervention in a college health care setting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".