A practice-based approach for converting from proton pump inhibitors to less costly therapy.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Projected cost for lansoprazole, the formulary proton pump inhibitor (PPI) at our institution, was $1.8 million in 1999. While some patients require PPI therapy, many could control their symptoms with a histamine H2-receptor antagonist blocker (H2 blocker) at a much lower cost. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate a practice-based approach to converting patients from PPIs to H2 blockers. DESIGN: Before-after study. SETTING: Portland Veterans Affairs Primary Care Clinics. INTERVENTION: We developed guidelines and educated clinicians about the use of PPIs and H2 blockers. To help physicians convert appropriate patients from PPIs to H2 blockers, we gave them a list of their patients receiving PPIs, form letters for patients explaining the conversion, and structured prescription forms. Patient lists and e-mail reminders, as well as feedback on institutional performance, were sent to clinicians during the intervention period. OUTCOME MEASURES: Number of PPI and H2 prescriptions per enrollee and pharmacy costs. RESULTS: The average number of PPI prescriptions per enrollee at our institution decreased from 0.39 in the 9 months before the intervention to 0.27 in the 9 months after the intervention. The associated pharmacy costs decreased from an average of $43 to $28 per enrollee per quarter, a difference of $15 or a savings of $80,000 per quarter. Accounting for the decrease in medication prices during the study, this difference was $11 per patient per quarter, corresponding to a savings of about $60,000 per quarter. With respect to the conversion process, more than 70% of clinicians felt the intervention had a big impact on how they prescribed PPIs and H2 blockers. Eighty-two percent of clinicians converted patients from PPIs to H2 blockers during clinic time; 56% did so during administrative time. Overall, more clinicians considered the intervention to be helpful rather than a hassle. CONCLUSIONS: The number of PPI prescriptions decreased during the intervention and was sustained at least three quarters afterward. This low-intensity, practice-based intervention may serve as a model for other health care systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".