Information exchange among physicians caring for the same patient in the community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The exchange of information is an integral component of continuity of health care and may limit or prevent costly duplication of tests and treatments. This study determined the probability that patient information from previous visits with other physicians was available for a current physician visit. METHODS: We conducted a multicentre prospective cohort study including patients discharged from the medical or surgical services of 11 community and academic hospitals in Ontario. Patients included in the study saw at least 2 different physicians during the 6 months after discharge. The primary outcome was whether information from a previous visit with another physician was available at the current visit. We determined the availability of previous information using surveys of or interviews with the physicians seen during current visits. RESULTS: A total of 3250 patients, with a total of 39 469 previous-current visit combinations, met the inclusion criteria. Overall, information about the previous visit was available 22.0% of the time. Information was more likely to be available if the current doctor was a family physician (odds ratio [OR] 1.75, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.54-1.98) or a physician who had treated the patient before the hospital admission (OR 1.33, 95% CI 1.21-1.46). Conversely, information was less likely to be available if the previous doctor was a family physician (OR 0.38, 95% CI 0.32-0.44) or a physician who had treated the patient before the admission (OR 0.72, 95% CI 0.60-0.86). The strongest predictor of information exchange was the current physician having previously received information about the patient from the previous physician (OR 7.72, 95% CI 6.92-8.63). INTERPRETATION: Health care information is often not shared among multiple physicians treating the same patient. This situation would be improved if information from family physicians and patients' regular physicians was more systematically available to other physicians.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".