Breaking barriers: Adjunctive use of the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) to reach adolescents with obesity living in remote locations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Implementation of telemedicine has been shown to improve health outcomes, such as body mass index (BMI). However, it is unclear whether telemedicine is useful alongside traditional weight-management programmes for adolescents with complex obesity. The objective was to evaluate implementation of the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN), a videoconferencing programme, as an adjunctive tool to face-to-face counselling within the setting of an established interdisciplinary obesity treatment programme. Methods Our observational cohort included two groups of adolescents enrolled in a clinical obesity-management programme over a two year period. Adolescents ( n = 50) in group 1 attended both in-person and virtual visits (OTN group), and adolescents ( n = 50) in group 2 received only in-person visits (comparison group). Within the OTN group, satisfaction survey responses were compared between patients and healthcare professionals. Change in BMI per month, paediatric quality of life scores, session attendance and demographic variables were compared between groups. Results OTN subjects averaged 4.9 telehealth visits per adolescent over the two year programme. Both OTN and comparison groups had similar changes in BMI ( p = 0.757), with increases over time ( p = 0.042). Paediatric quality of life scores in both groups improved over time compared to baseline ( p < 0.001), with higher scores for children compared to parental-reported child scores ( p = 0.008). Both adolescents and healthcare professionals using the OTN were similarly satisfied with their experience. Conclusion Adjunctive use of the OTN within the setting of a weight-management programme is feasible, well accepted by families and healthcare providers, and led to similar outcomes compared to usual care.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".