FH Healthcare Indicators analyzes trends involving place of service in recent years. Focusing on alternative places of service – retail clinics, urgent care centers, telehealth and ambulatory surgery centers — as well as emergency rooms, FH Healthcare Indicators evaluates changes in utilization, geographic and demographic factors, diagnoses, procedures and costs.

Some of the other key findings include:

• In retail clinics and urgent care centers in 2016, acute respiratory infections, such as the common cold, were the number one diagnostic category — but in telehealth, mental health-related diagnoses were the number one diagnostic category.
• Across all places of service studied in 2016, more claim lines were submitted for women than men in every adult age group; In 2016, the median charge for a 30-minute new patient office visit ranged from $294 in an office to $242 in an urgent care center to $109 in a retail clinic.
• From 2007 to 2016, claim lines for ASCs increased more in rural (127 percent) than urban (95 percent) areas.
• The age group 31 to 40 years accounted for the greatest percent of claim lines among patients using urgent care centers (18 percent), but among those using telehealth, the peak age groups were 41 to 50 and 51 to 60 years (each 19 percent).

The white paper also details FAIR Health's newly launched FH Medical Price Index, which tracks the growth in median procedure charges and median imputed allowed amounts from May 2012 to May 2017 in six procedure categories (none of which include facility fees): professional evaluation and management; hospital E&M; medicine (excluding E&Ms); surgery (procedures for which the physician would bill); pathology and laboratory; and radiology.

Some of the index's key findings:

• Of the six categories, hospital E&Ms had the greatest percent increase in charges and allowed amounts over the five years under study: 28 percent for the former, 26 percent for the latter.
• Charges for professional E&Ms increased 22 percent, and allowed amounts increased 21 percent.
• Surgery charges and allowed amounts both had much lower growth rates than E&Ms in the same five-year period: three percent for the former, two percent for the latter.
• Radiology charges and allowed amounts rose higher than surgery values in this period, but not by much: seven percent for both.
• Medicine charges and allowed amounts both had a steep rise from November 2012 to May 2013, with the allowed amount rise (eight percent) exceeding the rise in charges (six percent).
• From May 2013 to May 2014, pathology and laboratory charges stayed flat—but allowed amounts fell from six percent to three percent.

The relative flatness of the surgery indices compared to those for professional E&Ms in a hospital setting may be due to a number of factors, including hospitals buying physician practices, new technologies that lower prices and hospital surgeons needing to keep their prices competitive with ASCs, according to the white paper.

Both the newly launched indicators and index are based on the nonprofit's database of over 25 billion privately billed healthcare claims. FAIR Health will update and reissue FH Healthcare Indicators and the FH Medical Price Index annually.

In addition, FAIR Health makes available customized indicators and indices that offer specific data subsets (e.g., based on clinical category, geographic region or time period) of particular interest to stakeholders. Custom indicators and indices can be created to clients' specifications.