The Cost of Providing Methadone Maintenance Treatment in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To estimate the cost of providing methadone maintenance treatment in Ontario, Canada, from the perspective of the public payer. METHODS: We analyzed a database of all patient clinic visits, laboratory tests for urine toxicology screening, and methadone scripts from a group of methadone clinics in Ontario. The database consisted of patient visits and visit information from 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2009. We estimated the cost of providing methadone maintenance treatment as the sum of physician costs, laboratory costs for urine samples (toxicology screens), methadone costs, and pharmacy costs. Pharmacy costs include dispensing fees and markups. All costs are expressed in 2010 Canadian dollars. RESULTS: The database consisted of 9479 unique patients. The average age on the date of the first recorded visit was 34.3, and among the patients 62.3% were male. There were 6,425,937 patient days of treatment and the total cost of all treatment-related services was approximately $99,491,000. The total cost was comprised of physician billing (9.8%), pharmacy costs (39.8%), methadone (3.8%), and performing urine toxicology screens (46.7%). The average cost per day for treatment was $15.48, corresponding to $5651per year if patients were to remain in treatment continuously. CONCLUSIONS: The cost of providing methadone maintenance treatment in Ontario is comparable to estimates from the United States and Australia. SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE: This information is important to policy makers for planning and budgeting purposes and as part of a full cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analysis of methadone treatment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".