Nurse practitioners as primary care site champions for the screening and treatment of hepatitis C virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Primary care providers are often the first point of contact for hepatitis C virus (HCV) care, yet treatment initiation in primary care continues to be low. Nurse practitioners (NPs) are autonomous providers who, in Ontario, currently prescribe HCV therapy; however, methods to engage primary care NPs in HCV care have not occurred. PURPOSE: To assess the feasibility of a systematic approach to train and support NPs in HCV testing, care, and treatment. METHODOLOGY: Nurse practitioners from Canada's largest family health team (FHT) were recruited. Nurse practitioners received six hours of training and develop approaches to screen and treat at FHT sites. Treatment algorithms were given, and the number and types of inquiries from NPs were recorded. RESULTS: Over 1 year, 9 NPs screened 1,026 patients; 87.4% were screened based on the identification of a risk factor. A mail-out approach for birth cohort screening occurred at a single site, resulting in rapid uptake in screening. Antibody prevalence was 1.66%, with 76.5% RNA positivity. All RNA-positive treatment-eligible individuals were treated by an NP and completed treatment. Thirty-eight consults occurred over 1 year, the majority related to HCV or liver disease staging. CONCLUSIONS: Formalized initiatives to engage and educate NPs lead to innovative strategies to test for HCV. Nurse practitioners can safely and effectively treat HCV in primary care with minimal support. IMPLICATIONS: This work could be extrapolated to NPs in other primary care settings. Implementing formalized strategies has the potential to create NP leaders in the treatment and elimination of HCV in Ontario, Canada, and globally.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".