Place of Care Trajectories in the Last Two Weeks of Life: A Population-Based Cohort Study of Ontario Decedents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Place of death is a commonly reported indicator of palliative care quality, but does not provide details of service utilization near end of life. This study aims to explore place of care trajectories in the last two weeks of life in a general population and by disease cohorts. DESIGN/SETTING: A retrospective population-based cohort study using linked administrative-health data to examine Ontario decedents between April 1, 2010 and December 31, 2012. MEASUREMENTS: Place of care trajectories in the last two weeks of life. RESULTS: We identified 235,159 decedents. Of which, 215,533 represented the major cohorts of our analysis-cancer (32%), frailty (29%), and organ failure (31%). Sixty-one percent of all decedents died in hospital-based settings. Place of care utilization trends show us a marked increase in use of palliative-acute hospital care (13%-26%) and acute hospital care (12%-25%) and a small decrease in community care use (15%-12%) in the last two weeks of life. Those with cancer were the largest users of palliative-acute hospital care, while those with organ failure were the largest users of acute-hospital care. CONCLUSIONS: Place of care trajectories show a marked rise in care in hospital-based settings from 29% to 61% in the last two weeks of life. Nearly half of all hospital deaths had palliative care as the main service provided. Place of care trajectories differ greatly by disease cohort. Exploring place of care trajectories in the last two weeks of life can illuminate end-of-life utilization patterns not evident when reporting solely place of death.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".