Patient Reported Outcomes Following Surgery for Lumbar Disc Herniation: Comparison of a Universal and Multitier Health Care System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Canada has a universal health care system that is government funded and access to specialist care requires a referral by general practitioners. The United States utilizes a blended public and private payer system where insured patients can directly access specialists. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there are differences in outcomes in the two systems. METHODS: Surgical lumbar disc herniation patients treated between 2013 and 2016 in Canada that were enrolled in the Canadian Spine Outcome Research Network (CSORN) prospective multicenter registry. The Canadian cohort was compared with the surgical cohort enrolled in the Spine Patients Outcome Research Trial (SPORT) study. Baseline demographics and spine-related patient reported outcomes (PROs) were compared at 3 mo and 1 yr postoperatively. RESULTS: The CSORN cohort consisted of 703 patients and the SPORT cohort was made up of 573 patients. The rate of females in each cohort was similar (47.2% vs 46.4%, P = .78), however, patients in the CSORN cohort were older (46.2 13.2 vs 41.6 10.9, P < .001), had a higher rate of smoking (32.0% vs 22.8%, P < .001), and were more likely to be employed (66.9% vs 61.3%, P = .034). The CSORN cohort had a slightly lower Owestry Disability score at baseline (50.515.1 vs 55.7 19.6, P < .01) but had a higher proportion of patients with a symptom duration greater than 6 mo (44.5% vs 21.1%, P < .0001). The CSORN cohort demonstrated significantly greater rates of satisfaction after surgery at 3 mo (74.8% vs 65.3%, P = .003) and 1 yr (81.4% vs 68.7%, P < .001). Improvements in back and leg pain followed similar trajectories. CONCLUSION: Patients undergoing surgical treatment for lumbar disc herniation in Canada (CSORN cohort) reported higher rates of satisfaction at 3 mo and 1 yr postoperatively compared to the United States cohort (SPORT) despite having longer durations of symptoms prior to surgery.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".