Cost-minimization analysis of community pharmacy-based point-of-care testing for strep throat in 5 Canadian provinces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Strep throat point-of-care (POC) testing in community pharmacies will enable pharmacist-based care for this condition. Our objective was to conduct an economic evaluation of treating severe sore throat when this service was offered in pharmacies in 5 Canadian provinces. METHODS: We conducted 5 separate cost-minimization analyses for the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan, from the public payer perspective, to estimate mean cost per patient of treating severe sore throat in 2 scenarios: 1) physician-based usual care in a family physician's office, a walk-in clinic or an emergency room (ER) and 2) a new scenario where patients received care described above or in a pharmacy offering strep throat POC testing. One-way sensitivity analyses were conducted to account for model uncertainty. RESULTS: Mean cost per patient for each pathway in the base-case analyses for the 5 provinces ranged from 1) $37.55 to $61.57 for family physician, 2) $37.55 to $61.57 for walk-in clinic, 3) $38.88 to $57.56 for ER and 4) $19.12 to $21.83 for pharmacy, representing savings ranging from $12.47 to $24.36 per patient for the new scenario. Approximate total cost savings range from $1.3 million to $2.6 million per year across the 5 provinces. All sensitivity analyses yielded cost savings for the new scenario. DISCUSSION: Across 5 provinces, strep throat POC testing in pharmacies was cost saving compared to physician-based care. Sensitivity analyses demonstrated the robustness of these results. CONCLUSIONS: Funding strep throat POC testing in community pharmacies in these 5 provinces would lead to public health system cost savings and potentially improve patients' access to care for severe sore throat.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".