Are the Creation and Maintenance of Databases in Healthcare Worthwhile? An Example of a Unique, Population-Based, Radiation Therapy Database
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A population-based prospective database targeting 15 key radiation therapy (RT) features was initiated in British Columbia in 1984. This 25-year outcome report assessed the utility of the database and demonstrated that such a database can be used to (1) describe population-based utilization of a health service, (2) inform treatment policy recommendations, (3) inform system planning and resource allocation, (4) audit regional and individual oncology practices, (5) assess whether new observations from randomized trials have been translated into population health gains and (6) produce peer-reviewed publications. Health system managers and researchers could benefit from the development and support of such databases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.158 | 0.310 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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".