Using Information Technology to Assess Patient Risk Factors in Primary Care Clinics: A Pragmatic Evaluation (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND Tobacco use, physical inactivity and poor diet are associated with morbidity and premature death. Health promotion and primary prevention counseling, advice and support by a primary care provider leads to behaviour change attempts among patients. However, although physicians consider preventative health important the focus on presentation, acute care and medication review often overshadows primary prevention counseling. OBJECTIVE This study evaluates feasibility, adoption and integration of the tablet-based Risk Factor Identification Tool (RFIT) that uses algorithmic information technology to support obtainment of patient risk factor information in primary care clinics. METHODS This is a pragmatic developmental evaluation. Each clinic developed a site-specific implementation plan adapted to their workflow. RFIT was implemented in two primary care clinics located in Manitoba. Perceptions of 10 clinic staff and 8 primary care clinicians informed this evaluation. RESULTS Clinicians reported a smooth and fast transfer of RFIT responses to an EMR encounter note. There were 207 patients that used the RFIT with a completion rate of 86%. Clinic staff reported that very few patients declined the use of RFIT or required assistance to use the tablet. Among the patients that used RFIT 12.1% smoked, 21.2% felt their diet could be improved, 9.3% reported high alcohol consumption, 56.4% reported less than 150 minutes of PA a week, and 8.2% lived in poverty. Clinicians suggested that although a wide variety of patients were able to use the tablet-based RFIT, implemented surveys should be tailored to patient subgroups. CONCLUSIONS Clinicians and clinic staff positively reviewed the use of information technology in primary care. RFIT is a user-friendly tool that provides an effective method for obtaining risk factor information from patients. It is particularly useful for subsets of patients lacking continuity in the care they receive. When implemented within a context that can support practical interventions to address identified risk factors, RFIT can inform brief interventions within primary care.
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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 | 0.059 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".