FAIR Health Offers Chronic Care Analytics

May 16, 2019

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic conditions are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States, and a leading driver of healthcare costs. A RAND Corporation study reported that as of 2014, 60 percent of Americans had at least one chronic condition, and 42 percent had more than one. The care of patients with chronic conditions is an issue of enormous importance for stakeholders across the healthcare sector—including hospitals and health systems, individual providers, payors and policy makers. For all such audiences, FAIR Health offers customized data analytics that illuminate diverse aspects of chronic conditions and their treatments and costs.

Drawing on our repository of over 28 billion privately billed healthcare claim records, FAIR Health can create custom analytics that yield the specific insights stakeholders need into the trends and patterns associated with chronic conditions. We can analyze the impact of chronic care on the healthcare system in terms of utilization of services and associated costs. Our analytics can shed light on prevalence, comorbidities (including multiple chronic conditions) and demographics, such as age and gender. Because our database is national in scale and geographically granular, we can analyze variations in chronic care at regional, state and local levels. We can present information on the most common services being rendered to treat each type of chronic condition, and the places of service at which they are rendered.

FAIR Health has conducted longitudinal studies on patients with chronic conditions in which we identified their most common chronic conditions as well as co-occurring chronic conditions for those same patients. The studies investigated such aspects as prevalence, utilization of services and costs.

In another study, also using a longitudinal cohort, we compared common diagnoses in pediatric patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes to those in pediatric patients without those conditions in the period from 2011 to 2015. The data revealed marked differences. In patients without diabetes and obesity, the most common ailments were asthma, allergic rhinitis, acute bronchitis and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In contrast, the most common comorbidities in children with obesity and diabetes were back pain, kidney disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

FAIR Health also has found that pediatric obesity and pediatric type 2 diabetes both increased from 2007 to 2018, but since 2013 obesity increased at a faster rate. Overall, from 2007 to 2018, pediatric obesity increased 339 percent, pediatric type 2 diabetes 92 percent.

FAIR Health President Robin Gelburd commented: “Chronic conditions are a national concern relevant to all healthcare stakeholders. FAIR Health custom analytics can open a window into chronic care, potentially informing improvements to clinical practice, coverage design and population health management on national and regional levels.”

For more information on FAIR Health custom analytics, contact us by email at info@fairhealth.org or call us at 855-301-3247, Monday through Friday, 9 am to 6 pm ET.