The Perceptions of Patient Copayment on the Reported Adherence to Prescription Medication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In South Africa, a large proportion of the population is dependent entirely on the publicly funded system for healthcare, while private funding covers only a small percentage of those who can afford to pay for health insurance or out-of-pocket payments. Non-compliance to medical treatment is a well-known problem and may lead to an increase in healthcare costs. OBJECTIVES: To investigate how the perception of prescription copayments influences medication use and the effect of this on safe and correct medicine usage METHODS: The study was conducted with a sample of patients from the Umbilo suburb of eThekwini, South Africa. Participants were members of a medical scheme and completed a questionnaire after informed consent. The questionnaire design included an eight-item scale to ascertain the degree of concern regarding prescription costs. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics; associations between household characteristics and outcomes were explored using odds ratios and chi square analysis. RESULTS: Overall 82% of the participants reported that prescription cost was a major factor that influenced medication collection. The association between demographic data and concern scale was assessed and revealed that participants had an increased concern with meeting prescription costs (OR 1.73, 95% CI 0.66-4.52). Most (93%) of the participants with a salary less than ZAR10 000 indicated a concern with prescription costs (chi square=21.7, df=2, p<0.05). CONCLUSION: The study indicated that prescription cost posed as a barrier to medication adherence as the copayment affected patients’ decisions to continue optimal treatment.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".