Coming Soon: FH® Healthcare Indicators and FH® Medical Price Index 2024

March 21, 2024

On March 26, FAIR Health will release the seventh annual edition of two valued measures that provide perspective in a rapidly changing healthcare environment: FH® Healthcare Indicators and FH® Medical Price Index. Drawing on the independent nonprofit’s national database of billions of private healthcare claims—the largest in the country—these two measures apply different approaches to illuminate different aspects of the national healthcare sector. Both will be presented in a white paper entitled FH® Healthcare Indicators and FH® Medical Price Index 2024: An Annual View of Place of Service Trends and Medical Pricing. All findings will be updated to keep pace with a year of change.

FH Healthcare Indicators analyze trends involving the place of service where patients receive healthcare. Focusing on alternative places of service—retail clinics, urgent care centers, telehealth and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs)—as well as emergency rooms (ERs), FH Healthcare Indicators evaluate changes in utilization, geographic and demographic factors, diagnoses, procedures and costs.

FH Medical Price Index tracks median charges and allowed amounts associated with six procedure categories from May 2012 to November 2023: professional evaluation and management (E&M), hospital E&M, medicine, surgery, pathology and laboratory, and radiology. This report does not consider facility fees.

Among the findings to be released in the white paper:

  • Utilization increased the most in retail clinics (202 percent) from 2021 to 2022.1 Utilization increased 138 percent in ERs, 88 percent in ASCs, 43 percent in urgent care centers and 8 percent in telehealth.
  • ERs held the highest percentage of medical claim lines in 2022 among the places of service studied, with 4.2 percent of all medical claim lines nationally. The comparable percentages for the other places of service were 3.9 percent for telehealth, 2.1 percent for urgent care centers, 1.1 percent for ASCs and 0.2 percent for retail clinics. The remainder of the services were rendered in traditional places of service, such as physician offices.
  • Of the six procedure categories, from November 2022 to November 2023, professional E&Ms and medicine each had the greatest percent increase in charge amount index, five percent. Professional E&Ms and hospital E&Ms each had the greatest increase in allowed amount index, three percent.


1 Utilization in this study is a relative, normalized measure, not an absolute one. See the Methodology section of the white paper.