A Case Study on the Substitution Effect between the Length of GP Consultation and Drug Prescribing Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between the length of GP consultation in primary care and drug prescribing practices is still a subject for debate. Patients' morbidity, generating both very long consultation times and large volumes of prescriptions, may mask an underlying substitution among GPs regarding the length of time they offer to patients versus the alternative of prescribing pharmaceuticals. We propose to pursue the debate by analyzing the results of a case vignette, submitted to 1,900 GPs, in which patient morbidity is controlled for by definition. In this case - a hypothetical patient suffering from mild depression - we observe the choice between three types of treatment strategy: psychotherapy, drug therapy and a combination of the two. We observe that the GPs with the highest consultation rates were twice as likely to adopt the drug therapy option as their counterparts with lower rates of consultation. Moreover, for more than 50% of drug prescriptions, the medical decisions contradict clinical practice guidelines.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| 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".