A comparative study on the utility of telehealth in the provision of rheumatology services to rural and northern communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: There is a critical shortage of specialty rheumatology services in Canada. The impact is felt more in rural and northern regions than on urban areas of the country. In response to the need, this study was conducted to compare the satisfaction of referring physicians with rheumatology services through conventional visiting specialty clinics; email consults and regularly scheduled videoconference. METHODS: Three rural communities of similar size and availability of physician services were assigned to one of the following means of providing outreach rheumatology services: visiting rheumatologist clinics, email access to rheumatologist and scheduled videoconference consults. A case based pre/post test, and post satisfaction questionnaire were administered to the primary care physicians in these communities. Patient outcomes, and physician ability and confidence in managing specific arthritis problems, were measured. RESULTS: Physicians responded positively to all methods of rheumatology service provision. The videoconference group were the most positive. The reasons were: immediate feedback to referring physician and patient, effective case based learning and transfer of knowledge, and improved accessibility. CONCLUSION: Videoconference is preferred to visiting clinics and email as a method for rheumatology services to rural/northern communities. It is cost effective and there is knowledge transfer between the rheumatologist and the referring physicians.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".