High rate of fistula placement in a cohort of dialysis patients in a single payer system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arteriovenous fistulas (AVFs) are considered superior to arteriovenous grafts and catheters. Nevertheless, AVF prevalence in the United States remains under the established target. The complication rates and financial cost of vascular access continue to rise and disproportionately contribute to the burgeoning health care costs. The relationship between financial incentives for a type of vascular access and rate of access placement is unclear. All chronic hemodialysis patients (n=99) receiving care at Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center as of August 1, 2008 were participants. Demographic characteristics, vascular access type, and nonrelative value unit compensation were assessed as predictors, and the vascular access prevalence rate, operative times, and frequency of access interventions were analyzed. A 73.7% AVF rate was achieved in this cohort of patients with 51.5% diabetes mellitus. The number of access procedures per patient per year remained constant over time. The Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a single payer system, achieved superior AVF prevalence and exceeded the national AVF target. Financial incentives for arteriovenous graft placement currently exist in the United States, as there is similar Medicare reimbursement for arteriovenous graft and basilic vein transposition, despite longer operative times for basilic vein transpositions. The high AVF prevalence at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center may be due to the VA nonrelative value unit-driven system that allows for interdisciplinary care, priority of AVFs, and frequent use of basilic vein transposition surgery, when appropriate. We have identified an important, hypothesis-generating example of a nonrelative value unit-based approach to vascular access yielding superior results with respect to patient care and cost.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".