Management of nonurgent common gastroenterology referrals using primary care clinical pathways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate health system use, health outcomes, and avoided costs when patients with chronic gastrointestinal (GI) conditions are managed in the medical home. DESIGN: A retrospective, observational cohort study was conducted through a single-point-of-entry referral system. SETTING: Calgary, Alta. PARTICIPANTS: Patients with referrals for any of 7 nonurgent indications. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Patients with referrals for any of 7 nonurgent indications were returned to primary care for management, guided by evidence-based primary care pathways. Patients were linked to administrative databases to extract indications, re-referral rates, endoscopy findings and outcomes, number of emergency department and urgent care visits, and number of hospital admissions. Costs avoided were estimated using Canadian Institute for Health Information data for health care use, consultation, and endoscopy. RESULTS: Between July 1, 2018, and May 31, 2020, a total of 3435 routine referrals were closed for 3274 patients. The most common pathway used was dyspepsia (1154 of 3435, 33.6%). A total of 362 patients (11.1%) had 616 GI-related emergency department or urgent care visits; 52 (1.6%) patients experienced 68 GI-related hospitalizations. A total of 396 patients (12.1%) underwent endoscopy; of the 348 patients with findings available for analysis, 7.8% exhibited a clinically significant finding. The estimated total cost avoided was $1,477,237. CONCLUSION: The implementation of co-developed primary care pathways safely supports the care of patients with common, nonurgent GI conditions within the medical home. In this population, rates of re-referral and health care use were low, resulting in avoidance of substantial costs and improved overall appropriateness of 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 | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".