Alberta Government Announces Prescription Renewal Payment for Pharmacists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Five years after Alberta pharmacists became the first in Canada to acquire the authority to renew, modify and in some cases, prescribe medications, the Alberta government has announced that pharmacists will be paid to provide prescription renewals to their patients. The announcement came in the provincial budget delivered on February 13, 2012. Effective July 1, the province will pay pharmacists $20 for each prescription renewal — projected to cost the government $20 million in 2012–13. Also on July 1, the government will start providing pharmacies in remote communities with a monthly grant to help them adjust to lower generic drug prices that take effect at the same time. The grant payments are to total $15.9 million over 3 years. In 2010, Alberta introduced a 3-year Transition Allowance, providing additional payment on dispensing fees for prescriptions under $75. The allowance will be phased out after 2012–13. The province plans to reduce the prices it pays for generic drugs starting July 1 as well; currently, the price is 45% of the name-brand price. The size of the reduction has not yet been announced, as the government continues negotiations with pharmacists; however, the province says its goal is to save $85 million a year in drug spending. The province amended regulations in 2007 to expand pharmacists' scope of practice, and Alberta pharmacists and the Ministry of Health and Wellness have been negotiating a professional services compensation framework since 2009. Additional pharmacy services and compensation models, says the government, are to be announced in the coming months.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.006 |
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".