Discussion of cost continues to be uncommon in companion animal veterinary practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine the prevalence and nature of cost conversations occurring during veterinarian-client-patient interactions within companion animal practice. SAMPLES: 60 randomly selected, practicing veterinarians working in 55 practices across southern Ontario, Canada, and 909 of their clients, sampled by convenience. PROCEDURES: A cross-sectional descriptive study including 917 video-recorded appointments. Associations between veterinarian, client, or appointment-level factors and occurrence of a cost conversation were evaluated using multi-level logistic regression. RESULTS: 215 of 917 (23.4%) videos included a discussion of cost between the veterinarian and client. Cost conversations involving veterinarians primarily focused on conveying the price in relation to the time or service being offered (74.0% [159/215]), whereas the benefit to the future health and wellness of the patient was conveyed in 14.4% (31/215) of veterinarians' cost conversations. Costs were most frequently discussed by veterinarians in relation to diagnostic testing (44.2% [96/215]). The odds of a cost discussion occurring were greater during problem appointments versus wellness (P = .011) or recheck (P = .029) appointments, for feline versus canine patients (P = .037), as appointment duration increased (P < .001), and as a client's number of visits in the past year decreased (P = .049). CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Discussing cost of care in veterinary practice continues to be relatively uncommon. Opportunities exist for veterinary professionals to frame their communication of the cost of veterinary care in relation to the benefits offered to the future health and wellbeing of the veterinary patient.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".