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Record W4205392467 · doi:10.1097/pra.0000000000000374

Second Opinions

2019· review· en· W4205392467 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Psychiatric Practice · 2019
Typereview
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicHealthcare cost, quality, practices
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSpecialtyExpert opinionWork (physics)Best practiceMedical educationTest (biology)PsychologyFamily medicineMedicinePublic relationsManagementPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

March, 2019. I have had the good fortune to be a member of the North American Medical Advisory Board for an organization called Best Doctors, Inc., recently acquired as part of Teladoc Health, a large global virtual health enterprise. Best Doctors is a “patient-initiated second opinion program” founded over 28 years ago by a group of Harvard physicians. The organization has developed a proprietary database of more than 50,000 medical experts in over 450 specialties worldwide, with a mission to “engage patients and physicians to work together to improve outcomes.” It serves as a benefit provided by large corporations as part of their employee benefit package, and it is also offered by health plans as a policyholder benefit. I would say that the basic principle underlying this important work is that, to quote the founders of the Menninger Clinic where I work, “two heads are better than one, and three are better than two.” Best Doctors emphasizes that its role is to identify an expert physician in the appropriate specialty who can review a given patient’s medical issues, collaborate with the patient’s treating clinicians, review all available laboratory and test results, and then provide an expert, outside, second opinion to the patient and the patient’s treatment team. Ideally, we should all have the humility not to claim to know it all, and to welcome input from other knowledgeable expert sources. In the busy rush of practice, however, it isn’t easy to find the time to reach out for such input. And, if patients or families request to see another provider for a second opinion, it can complicate things. No matter how much we routinely welcome advice and input, we may not be familiar with the outside consultant or his or her qualifications. It’s hard to know how often this kind of second opinion occurs in psychiatric practice. When I was asked to join the Best Doctors Advisory Board in 2014, a large variety of medical specialties were represented on its expert panels, but there were no experts or programs in behavioral health. The organization readily acknowledged that this was a shortcoming, and, subsequently, starting in Canada and now in the United States, behavioral health is increasingly well represented on its roster of experts. In the November, 2018 issue of this Journal, Heuss and colleagues presented a thoughtful review paper entitled “Second Opinions in Psychiatry,” in which they emphasized the value of second opinion programs, and they discussed speculative reasons why such services have been so slow to develop in the field of psychiatry. The ubiquitous stigma surrounding mental illness, for example, may deter patients from revealing their issues to yet another stranger, given how difficult it was to seek help in the first place. There may also be the fear that it won’t really help and in fact could be like insurance companies’ determinations of “medical necessity,” where too often there is not support for ongoing treatment. Hopefully, however, we are moving to a better comfort zone in these matters, as the importance of integrated care, where collaboration is essential, is recognized. In this issue of the Journal, Coulter and colleagues focus on a specific type of second opinion with respect to early-onset psychosis. Citing the known importance of prompt identification of an emerging psychotic condition, and that early implementation of treatment in such cases leads to better outcomes, these authors studied the records of patients referred to a specialty early psychosis consultation clinic. They found that 55% of the patients in the study had a primary diagnosis at referral of a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. However, in 42% of those cases, a primary diagnosis of a psychotic disorder was not justified, in the opinion of the experts in the consultation clinic. The potential risk, therefore, of overdiagnosing schizophrenia is an important lesson suggested by the findings of this study. John M. Oldham, MDEditor

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.018
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.019
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Research integrity, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesResearch integrity, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.669
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0180.019
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0040.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0020.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.006

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.

Opus teacher head0.734
GPT teacher head0.653
Teacher spread0.081 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it