The economics of dentistry: a neglected concern
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Demand for economic evaluations in health care is growing with expectations that they will help to develop regional and national policies on health and social programmes. We present here the scope, quality and content of systematic reviews and meta-analyses relating to the economics of dentistry published over the last 15 years. OBJECTIVES: To review the quality and outcome of systematic reviews and meta-analyses relating to the economics of dental treatments, preventions and services. METHODS: A systematic search was conducted in 14 electronic databases for systematic reviews and meta-analyses published between January 1997 and July 2011 on the economics of oral disorders and oral health care. Review papers were extracted by two independent investigators to identify the characteristics, results and quality of the reviews and to highlight gaps in knowledge about the economics of dentistry. RESULTS: From 3150 unique references, we found 73 systematic reviews or meta-analyses of dental economics as primary or secondary outcomes. The focus of 12 of them was on the cost or cost-effectiveness of dental prevention, 54 on treatment, five on prevention and treatment and two on delivery of dental services. However, only 12 of the systematic reviews drew conclusions from economic data, and four of them constructed an economic model from synthesized data. Overall, the quality was good in the 12 systematic reviews but poor in the original studies. CONCLUSIONS: There is very little helpful data published on the economics of dentistry.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".