Delay in consultation with specialists for persons with suspected new‐onset rheumatoid arthritis: A population‐based study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Care in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is optimized by involvement of rheumatologists. We wished to determine whether patients suspected of having new-onset RA in Québec consulted with a rheumatologist, to document any delay in these consultations, and to determine factors associated with prompt consultation. METHODS: Physician reimbursement administrative data were obtained for all adults in Québec. Suspected new-onset cases of RA in the year 2000 were defined operationally as a physician visit for RA (based on the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision diagnostic codes), where there had been no prior visit code to any physician for RA in the preceding 3 years. For those patients who were first diagnosed by a nonrheumatologist, Cox regression modeling was used to identify patient and physician characteristics associated with time to consultation with a rheumatologist. RESULTS: Of the 10,001 persons coded as incident RA by a nonrheumatologist, only 27.3% consulted a rheumatologist within the next 2.5-3.5 years. Of those who consulted, the median time from initial visit to a physician for RA to consultation with a rheumatologist was 79 days. The strongest predictors of shorter time to consultation were female sex, younger age, being in a higher socioeconomic class, and having greater comorbidity. CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that the vast majority of patients suspected of having new-onset RA do not receive rheumatology care. Further action should focus on this issue so that outcomes in RA may be optimized.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".