REDUCED OUT-OF-POCKET COSTS AND MEDICATION ADHERENCE – A POPULATION-BASED STUDY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In 2007, a drug benefit plan for Seniors (SDP) was launched in Saskatchewan, Canada. SDP capped out-of-pocket costs at $15 per prescription for individuals aged 65 and older. OBJECTIVES: To quantify the impact of the SDP on chronic medication adherence. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted for participants aged 65 or older who were eligible to the SPD, controlled by a younger group aged 40 to 64 who were ineligible. Adherence was measured over 365 days using medication possession ratio (MPR). MPRs were compared between age groups, and between pre and post SDP-launch periods. The odds ratio of optimal adherence (i.e., MPR≥80%) was estimated using logistic regression models with generalized estimating equations (GEE). RESULTS: Between 2005 and 2009, 353,568 adherence observations were observed from 188,109 unique patients. Comparing the post-SDP period vs before, the increase in the odds of optimal medication adherence was significant (OR=1.08, 95% CI: 1.04 to 1.11) and was stronger after excluding patients already receiving medication benefits from other government programs (OR= 1.21, 95% CI: 1.16 to 1.26). The SDP was associated with improved adherence among the subgroup of prevalent medication users (OR=1.08, 95% CI: 1.04 to 1.12), but not incident users (OR=1.05, 95% CI: 0.98 to 1.13). CONCLUSION: Reducing out-of-pocket medication costs for seniors was associated with small improvements in medication adherence across the population.
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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".