Ruba Sajdeya
University of Florida
Objective: To compare medical marijuana (MMJ) qualified physicians’ opinions regarding the effectiveness, dosing ability, product consistency, side effects, safety, and affordability of vaping vs. smoking as administration modes.
Great presentation, very informative.
Why do you think that out of 1612 physicians who received the survey, only 116 responded?
It would be interesting to analyze the effects of demographic factors on physician’s perspectives of MMJ in Florida.
Yes, I wondered about how you developed your sampling frame. Were you able to identify and remove contact information that wasn’t received?
For our sampling framework, we wanted to survey only physicians who actually issued patient certification within the previous 12 months. There were 2,663 qualified physicians registered at the OMMU at the time of the survey, of whom 1634 issued patient certification. We provided a list containing these identified physicians to a physician database vendor who linked the list to the American Medical Association Masterfile Physicians database to retrieve contact information and distributed the survey to 1612 physicians with full contact information. So we did not perform any stratification or randomization since we invited almost all of our target population to participate in the survey.
We also did remove contact information that wasn’t removed.
Thank you for your question. The response rate in our survey was 7.2%, which limits the generalizability of our findings. We compared our findings with the Physician Certification Pattern Review-2021 Annual Report, which showed that most patient certifications in 2020 were issued by 9% of overall qualified physicians. However, we asked our physicians about the number of certifications they issue per week and it showed that 51% of our sample was not from the super prescribers.
I agree with you that analyzing the effects of demographic findings would interesting, and that could be the next step we do.