Private Management of a Public Service: What Can Be Learned from the CROS Experience?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
n January 2001, Canadian Radiation Oncology Services (CROS) was awarded the first-ever contract for the private management of a publicly funded department of radiation oncology.Its goal was to help stop the referral of cancer patients from Ontario to the United States.Since April 1999, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) had been spending close to $375,000 every week to send 20 patients per week to the United States for radiation (for a total cost of $30 million).Immediately after CROS opened, breast cancer referrals stopped, and within three months, out-of-country referrals stopped completely.CROS saw its first patient in February 2001, and will see its last patient in August 2003.As of June 30, 2003, CROS has seen 2,018 patients, saving $30 million when compared to out-ofcountry referral.The success of CROS raises a number of questions, three of which are:
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 | 0.012 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
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".