The Cost of Burn Transfers: A Retrospective Review of 7 Years of Admissions to a Regional Burn Center
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transport of thermally injured patients can involve significant costs; however, not all thermally injured patients necessitate transfer to a burn center. The purpose of this study was to review transfers to an American Burn Association-verified regional burn center to determine whether the transfers were necessary and the cost associated with unnecessary transfers. A retrospective chart review identified 707 patients transferred to an American Burn Association-verified burn center with an acute burn injury during a 7-year period. For the purposes of this study, "unnecessary transfer" was defined as any patient admitted fewer than 7 days who did not undergo operative intervention. Transfer cost estimates were based on records from regional land paramedic and land and air medical transport services. In total, 27.3% of transfers were potentially "unnecessary transfers," with an associated cost of approximately $227,396.93 (18.9% of total transfer costs in study). Average unnecessary transfer cost varied by method of transport: land ambulance (n = 130) $285.72, helicopter (n = 27) $4,136.34, and airplane (n = 15) $4,908.67. The transfer of thermally injured patients is associated with significant cost. Unnecessary transfers represent an inefficient use of a limited resource in an already strained healthcare system. The findings of this study suggest that further initiatives should be explored to ensure the appropriate transfer of thermally injured patients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".