Chronic Conditions More Than Age Drive Health System Use in Canadian Seniors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Which has more impact on health status and the use of healthcare services among seniors: age or the number of chronic conditions? To answer this question, we used responses from the 2008 Canadian Survey of Experiences with Primary Health Care to assess the effect of these two factors on seniors' self-perceived health status, prescription medication use and healthcare service use. We discovered that seniors with at least three chronic conditions were more likely to report poor health, take more prescription medications and use more healthcare services than seniors with two or fewer chronic conditions. The number of chronic conditions is better than age as a predictor of self-reported health status, prescription medication use and healthcare service use by seniors. Seniors with at least three conditions represented 24% of all seniors, but they accounted for 40% of the use of healthcare services. Health policies and programs focused on the prevention and improved management of co-morbidities among seniors could have a significant and positive impact on seniors' health (including self-perceived health status) and their use of healthcare services.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".