Impact of Vaginal Antifungal Products on Utilization of Health Care Services: Evidence from Physician Visits
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recently many medications formerly available only by prescription have been approved for over-the-counter (OTC) status. In 1990, clotrimazole became the first available OTC drug to treat candidal vaginitis. Subsequently several other prescription antifungal medications have also been available in OTC products. One proposed benefit of these switches from prescription to OTC status is a reduction in the utilization of health care services. METHODS: Using National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey data, the average numbers of annual visits for vaginal complaints were estimated for 1985, 1990, and 1994. These years were chosen because they represented periods before, close to, and after the approval of the OTC antifungal preparations. The estimated visits for each year were compared using a chi-square analysis with a sample weight correction. RESULTS: There was a 15% decline in the number of vaginitis visits from 1990 to 1994 that potentially could be attributed to the availability of the OTC antifungal preparations. The decrease in physician visits results in approximately $45 million in direct cost savings and another $18.75 million in indirect savings by reducing time lost from work. CONCLUSIONS: It appears that the availability of OTC anticandidal fungal preparations reduces the number of physician visits for vaginitis, resulting in cost savings.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it