Yearly Clinical Laboratory Test Expenditures for Different Medical Specialties in a Major Canadian City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Very little is known about the relative contributions of physician specialty groups and individual physicians to overall clinical laboratory expenditures. The objectives of this study were to determine the costs of clinical laboratory test expenditures attributable to 30 medical specialties and the associated per capita physician expenditures for an entire major Canadian city. Only chemistry, hematology, and microbiology tests were included in this study. METHODS: Retrospective cohort study involving all physicians in Calgary, Canada, and surrounding areas (n = 3,499) and secondary data on laboratory test orders. RESULTS: Data were obtained on approximately 20 million test requests. The mean clinical laboratory test expenditure, in Canadian dollars, per physician was $27,945 for all physicians combined. Total expenditures by primary care physicians (family physicians and general practitioners) accounted for 58% of total expenditures. CONCLUSIONS: There was wide variation in clinical laboratory test expenditures among specialties and on a per capita basis within medical specialties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.094 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".