Healthcare Trends in the First Year of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic changed healthcare in many ways. A new report from FAIR Health shows some of those ways. These include a great rise in the use of telehealth. Telehealth is healthcare received through electronic devices, like telephones, computers and tablets. The report is the fifth yearly edition of the FH^® Healthcare Indicators and FH^® Medical Price Index white paper. It includes information on healthcare trends in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.

Telehealth and Other Places of Service
The report shows that the use of telehealth grew nationwide 7,060 percent from 2019 to 2020. The pandemic, and the ways people responded to it, drove this growth. For a time in 2020, limits were placed on certain in-office healthcare services. Many doctors and patients avoided meeting in person to lower the risk of getting COVID-19.

FAIR Health compared telehealth to certain other healthcare places of service. All but telehealth showed a drop in use in 2020, likely because of the pandemic. From 2019 to 2020, use fell 38 percent in ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) and 30 percent in emergency rooms (ERs). It also fell 16 percent in urgent care centers and 4 percent in retail clinics.

Gender
In the past, more claim lines were submitted for females than males in most age groups in the places of service studied. (Claim lines are the individual procedures or services listed on an insurance claim.) The same was true in 2020. But that year, in some places of service, the gap between males and females narrowed. For instance, in ERs, in the age group 61-70, the male and female shares were about the same (50 percent) in 2020. This was a change from 2019, when the female share had been 52 percent and the male share 48 percent. The narrowing of the gap was also seen in retail clinics, urgent care centers and ASCs.

Diagnoses
Every year, this report tracks the most common diagnoses in different places of service. In 2020, exposure to communicable diseases became one of the most common diagnoses in three places of service. The three were retail clinics, urgent care centers and telehealth. This diagnosis largely was linked with testing and/or care for COVID-19 when a patient was exposed to the illness.