The effects of cost-sharing on essential drug prescriptions, utilization of medical care and outcomes after acute myocardial infarction in elderly patients.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: After a change in Quebec's policy on drug coverage in August 1996, elderly patients' copayments for prescription drugs increased. We assessed the impact of this drug policy reform on prescribing patterns for essential cardiac medications, utilization of medical care and related health outcomes after acute myocardial infarction. METHODS: Patients at least 65 years of age who experienced acute myocardial infarction between 1994 and 1998 were identified through the Quebec discharge summary database. Drug claims databases were analyzed to determine rates of prescription of essential cardiac medications for cohorts of patients admitted before and after the policy reform. The impact on readmissions for cardiac-related complications, outpatient visits to physicians and emergency departments, and mortality rate was also assessed. RESULTS: The proportion of patients who received prescriptions for beta-blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and lipid-lowering drugs increased over time and, more specifically, did not appear to decline with the change in the drug policy. In addition, the policy reform did not appear to affect persistence of drug therapy (the proportion of time for which patients were covered by prescriptions over the year after discharge). There was no within-class shift from more to less expensive drugs. Use of cardiac procedures increased over time, but this increase was unrelated to the date of the policy reform. Finally, rates of readmission for complications, visits to individual physicians and to emergency departments, and mortality rate were unchanged. The findings did not vary with sex or socioeconomic status. INTERPRETATION: Prescriptions for essential cardiac medications and care related to acute myocardial infarction in elderly patients did not change with increases in out-of-pocket copayment, regardless of sex or socioeconomic status.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 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".