The Philadelphia High-School STD Screening Program: Key Insights From Dynamic Transmission Modeling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Brief Background: The Philadelphia high-school STD Screening Program (PHSSP) represents an innovative approach to screening-based control of Chlamydia trachomatis infection. The program has been associated with significant reductions in Chlamydia trachomatis prevalence in young females in Philadelphia. We sought to assess program cost-effectiveness in a manner that allowed us to quantify the impact of including males students in the screened population. Methods: We created a dynamic transmission model using a susceptible-infectious-resistant-susceptible framework. The model was parameterized using PHSSP program data, supplemented by available data from the medical and public health literature, and was used to project the impact of screening on disease burden, quality adjusted survival, and costs. Results: A well-calibrated model suggests that high-school based screening is highly cost-effective in the Philadelphia context. Five important insights are gained through dynamic transmission modeling of the PHSSP: (i) the importance of screening males can be appreciated using a dynamic transmission model; (ii) the attractiveness of screening males is inversely related to equilibrium prevalence in males; (iii) including males enhances both effectiveness and economic attractiveness of screening; (iv) rebound in prevalence does not greatly diminish the cost-effectiveness of screening; and (v) increasing program expenditures via increased screening coverage decreases net societal costs, due to diminished disease transmission. Conclusions: The current PHSSP is highly cost-effective relative to other commonly accepted interventions. Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of this program are enhanced by including males. This, and other important attributes of the program, is best appreciated when a dynamic transmission model is used for program evaluation. The Philadelphia high-school STD Screening Program (PHSSP) represents an innovative approach to screening-based control of Chlamydia trachomatis infection. We created a dynamic transmission model using a susceptible-infectious-resistant-susceptible framework that simulates the PHSSP. Important insights are gained through dynamic transmission modeling of the PHSSP, including the attractiveness of screening males for prevention of sequelae of infection in females. Such insights are not provided by traditional health economic models.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".