The cost of medical management of pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterial disease in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Treatment of pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infection is complex, requiring multiple antibiotics and a prolonged treatment course. We determined the monthly cost of treating patients with pulmonary NTM infections in our clinic, a tertiary care centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We reviewed records of a single clinic at the University Health Network (Toronto) for all patients with pulmonary NTM isolates. Pharmacological and nonpharmacological treatment costs were calculated using a number of Canadian references. 172 patients were reviewed, 91 of whom were treated pharmacologically. The median total duration and cost per treated patient were 14 months (interquartile range (IQR) 9-23 months) and CAD 4,916 (IQR CAD 2,934-9,063), respectively. Median monthly drug treatment cost was CAD 321 (IQR CAD 254-458) for all patients, CAD 289 (IQR CAD 237-341) for patients receiving exclusively oral antibiotics and CAD 1,161 (IQR CAD 795-1,646) for patients whose treatment included i.v. antibiotics. The most costly oral regiment consisted of a fluroquinolone, macrolide and rifampin. In multivariable analysis, Mycobacterium abscessus infection, i.v. therapy and Mycobacterium xenopi infection were all associated with increased monthly treatment costs. The direct medical costs of NTM infections are substantial. Less expensive alternative therapies might be most helpful for M. abscessus infection and when i.v. antibiotics are deemed necessary.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".