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Sep
07

COVID-19 Disrupted On-Time Vaccination Rates In ESI and Medicaid in 2020

It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic upended the U.S. health care system in 2020, with effects still being felt in 2022. HCCI previously published a brief that showed precipitous drops in the utilization of several preventive health care services in early 2020. Several news outlets have also covered the effect of the pandemic on routine services, including childhood vaccination rat...

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Dec
10

JAMA Research Letter: Primary Care Spending in the Commercially Insured Population

​Using HCCI's data, we assessed the share among individuals younger than 65 years covered by employer-sponsored insurance from 2013 to 2017.  We assessed primary care spending using 2 main definitions: a definition which included the total spending on services rendered by primary care clinicians (broad definition) and one where only CPT codes for specific services specified as prima...

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May
31

HCCI will be presenting at AcademyHealth's 2019 Annual Research Meeting

The Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) is proud to present five posters at the AcademyHealth 2019 Annual Research Meeting in Washington, D.C. These posters, which cover HCCI research on a wide variety of topics, focus on health care spending and utilization trends among the commercially insured population. If you are attending the conference, please check out the schedule below to meet our staff an...

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Dec
27

The Wall Street Journal: The Hidden System That Explains How Your Doctor Makes Referrals

By: Anna Wilde Mathews and Melanie Evans  More primary-care doctors work directly for hospitals, and they are being pushed to keep lucrative referrals in-house.  Phoebe Putney Health System doesn't want its doctors to send business to competitors. If they do, Phoebe makes sure their bosses know about it. Doctors working for the Albany, Ga.-based hospital system's affiliated physician gro...

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Nov
15

Trends In Primary Care Visits

Office visits to primary care physicians (PCPs) declined 18 percent from 2012 to 2016 for adults under 65 years old with employer-sponsored health insurance, while office visits to nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) increased 129 percent. Comparing 2012 to 2016, there were 273 fewer office visits per 1,000 insured individuals to primary care physicians over that span, while v...

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Mar
14

Health Affairs: Disinvesting In Primary Care?

By: Christopher Koller and Margaret O'Kane The Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) released its analysis of 2016 health spending for a group of commercial insurers last month. The report is a trove of information that, like all good analyses, suggests more questions than it answers. Buried in the report—in figure 15—is an alarming trend that should rise to the top of analysts' areas for further inve...

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Feb
01

An Examination of Private Payer Reimbursements to Primary Care Providers for Healthcare Services Using Telehealth, United States 2009-2013

This issue brief, in partnership with the National Academy for State Health Policy,  reports on reimbursement to primary care provides for health care services using telehealth.  Key findings include:  • Half of telehealth-related state policies were implemented in the last five years.• Although many states permit reimbursements for telehealth services, only seven&nbs...

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