Cost-Effectiveness of Physiotherapy Services for Chronic Condition Management: A Systematic Review of Economic Evaluations Conducted Alongside Randomized Controlled Trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: To determine the cost-effectiveness of physiotherapy (PT) to manage individuals with chronic conditions. Method: Design: Systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Eligibility: RCTs with adult participants diagnosed with ≥1 chronic condition, an intervention delivered or supervised by a physiotherapist, including an economic evaluation of the intervention provided. Procedure: Eight databases were searched. Title/abstract screening, full-text review, and data extraction were performed in duplicate. The quality of included studies was assessed using Cochrane's Risk of Bias Assessment 2.0. Results: Fifty-three articles were included in this review. Fifteen compared PT to no PT; 38 compared novel PT to conventional PT. Of the studies comparing PT to no PT, 53% found PT to be cost-effective. Of the studies comparing novel to conventional PT, 55% found novel interventions were cost-effective. Overall, PT was cost-effective in most studies related to arthritis, chronic low back pain, and chronic neck pain. The heterogeneity of study characteristics limited the ability to perform a meta-analysis. Conclusions: Over half of included studies reported PT to be cost-effective. Future high quality RCTs performing rigorous economic evaluations are needed to determine the cost-effectiveness of different interventions delivered or supervised by a PT to prevent disability for those with chronic conditions.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.024 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".