Patient time costs and out‐of‐pocket costs in hepatitis <scp>C</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is associated with substantial costs to patients, their caregivers and society. AIMS: We evaluated time costs (time spent seeking healthcare) and out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for patients with HCV and their caregivers. METHODS: We measured costs for 738 HCV outpatients in a tertiary-care clinic using a patient-completed questionnaire. Time and OOP costs were compared across disease stages and sociodemographic categories. We examined the association between cost and disease stage using linear regression adjusting for age, gender, marital status, education, income and Index of Coexistent Disease (ICED) comorbidity score. Costs were expressed in 2007 Canadian dollars. RESULTS: The mean annual time cost per patient was $2136 (98 h), and ranged from $281 (18 h) in individuals who had cleared the virus to $9416 in transplant recipients (420 h). Caregiver costs were reported in 10% of patients. The mean annual OOP cost per patient was $1326. Patients receiving active treatment and those with late-stage disease spent $2500-2800 per year on HCV-related healthcare, approximately 7% of their annual income. Patients who had cleared the virus had the lowest time and OOP costs. Low income and unemployed patients had higher costs. CONCLUSIONS: In HCV-infected individuals, OOP and time costs represent a significant economic burden and fall disproportionately upon those least able to afford them. The lower cost burden among those who were successfully treated suggests that wider use of antiviral therapy may reduce economic burden in addition to improving health outcomes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".