The FH Medical Price Index presents a five-year overview of the weighted average growth in median billed charges and median allowed amounts in six key procedure categories:

• Professional evaluation and management (E&M; excluding E&Ms performed in a hospital setting);
• Hospital E&M (excluding E&Ms performed in a professional setting, such as typical office visits);
• Medicine (excluding E&Ms);
• Surgery (procedures for which the physician would bill);
• Pathology and laboratory (including both technical and professional components, e.g., both equipment and physician services); and
• Radiology (including both technical and professional components).

The current categories emphasize professional fees and related costs and do not reflect facility fees.

By making May 2012 the base month to which values in later periods are compared, the FH Medical Price Index establishes a consistent point of reference that makes it easy to identify and compare pricing shifts.

The first release of the FH Medical Price Index, as reported on in the white paper FH Healthcare Indicators™ and FH Medical Price Index™: A New View of Place of Service Trends and Medical Pricing, showed increasing prices in every procedure category, but also differences in the extent of those increases, and sudden rises and dips as well as more steady growth.

Although the FH Medical Price Index is national in scope with defined procedure categories, FAIR Health can prepare indices customized to your needs—for example, highlighting targeted geographic areas and procedure categories or itemized time periods. You can obtain them in a variety of formats, including white papers, PowerPoint presentations or stand-alone visualizations. Learn more about such FH Custom Analytics here.

FH Healthcare Indicators examines several important aspects of the healthcare sector, including changes in utilization, geographic and demographic factors, diagnoses, procedures and pricing. In its first release, it focused on alternative places of service—retail clinics, urgent care centers, telehealth and ambulatory surgery centers and compared them to the more traditional venues of emergency rooms and offices.

Based on analysis of claim lines, the report showed how places of service varied in their growth, as well as in their most common diagnoses, most common procedures, and billed charges and allowed amounts for their most common procedure codes. It also studied the places of service in relation to patient age and gender as well as state and rural versus urban settings.

FH Healthcare Indicators was first launched in the white paper FH Healthcare Indicators™ and FH Medical Price Index™: A New View of Place of Service Trends and Medical Pricing. Although FH Healthcare Indicators is national in scope and has defined points of inquiry, FAIR Health can prepare indicators customized to your needs, with specific data subsets—for example, based on a particular clinical category, geographic region or time period. Learn more about such FH Custom Analytics here.

The same trusted healthcare benchmarks used nationally to process claims, shape healthcare policy and inform health systems research can be accessed by your members or employees to estimate their healthcare costs—through your website and/or mobile app.

With our Application Programming Interface (API), you can easily integrate the cost data you license from FAIR Health into your web applications, enabling members and employees to estimate healthcare costs with up-to-date, geographically specific charge information. Among other uses, these data can be added to health plan enrollment platforms to support comparison of offerings based on plan type, cost-sharing provisions and benefit design; presented through insurers’ member portals to allow comparison of in-network and out-of-network costs; and made available to customer service representatives to assist members seeking to estimate the cost of care.

Based on claims from 493 geographic regions nationwide, benchmarks can be delivered by API for more than 15,000 procedure codes, including:

• Medical professional services;
• Anesthesia services;
• Dental services; and
• Equipment, supplies and services billed with HCPCS codes.

The following elements can be made available in your applications:

• Procedure code;
• Procedure description for all codes (Spanish translation available for most commonly searched codes); and
• Charge benchmarks based on 12 months of data and updated twice per year. Select from the 5th to 95th percentiles for display.

FAIR Health will provide you with our standard API, documentation and user authentication to allow real-time information transfer.