The Hidden Costs and Characteristics of Childhood Rotavirus Emergency Visits in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Administrative databases are often used to determine burden of rotavirus disease in emergency departments (EDs). Our objective was to describe rotavirus ED visits to include healthcare utilization pre- and postvisit to estimate true societal costs. METHODS: During rotavirus seasons in 2007, 2008, and 2009, a convenience sample of children <3 years of age with vomiting and/or diarrhea and rotavirus in stool samples at ED visits was identified at 5 pediatric hospitals in Canada. Interviews took place within 24 hours and 2 weeks after diagnosis, and ED charts were reviewed. Using unit costs for all resources, healthcare and societal costs were determined in Canadian dollars. RESULTS: A total of 199 children (mean age, 16 months; range, 1-35 months) had rotavirus and had a completed initial questionnaire on record. Prior healthcare provider visits had occurred in 104 (52.3%) before and 50/172 (29.1%) children 2 weeks after the ED visit. The mean healthcare cost of the ED visit alone was $218.10 (95% confidence interval [CI]: $198, $238), and the mean societal cost was $261.40 (95% CI: $240, $283). Including both total healthcare and parental costs, this increased to a mean total societal cost of $674.80 (95% CI: $578, $771) per episode of rotavirus infection. CONCLUSIONS: Both the pre- and postvisit costs contribute substantially to the societal costs associated with an ED visit for rotavirus infection. In Canada, we estimate that the annual healthcare cost for children requiring a rotavirus ED visit ranges from $4.5 to $9.3 million, but when parental costs are included, the total societal cost ranges from $8.9 to $18.4 million.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".