The explosive growth of telehealth has been discussed extensively in the past year. To provide even greater insights into the nature of this COVID-19 driven-trend, BHI studied our conformed national medical claims data set, comprised of more than 22 billion claims that represent 217 million unique lives, to unearth different telehealth insights.

Throughout 2020, Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) used its access to more than 20 billion claims from over 200 million unique members to examine healthcare trends affecting the health of millions of Americans. This digest contains five studies on the following topics: COVID-19, men’s health, UV safety, HPV vaccinations, and childhood obesity.

This brief examines COVID-19’s impact on preventive services and telehealth using national claims data from 2019 and 2020.  The descriptive studies of preventive service episodes included doctor visits and related preventive screenings such as mammograms, pap smears, and colonoscopies. The study also looks at differences in the use of preventive services and telehealth between urban and rural areas.

Research from Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) found that trends in obesity increased in both adults and children from 2016 to 2019. Children ages 2-4 showed the highest annual increase (20.6%). Childhood obesity puts children at increased risk of disease, and these health risks can continue into adulthood.

Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) examined claims data for females and males who were continuously enrolled in a commercial health insurance plan and found the rate of HPV vaccination increased 5.9 percentage points for females and 7.8 percentage points for males in four years (2016 and 2019.)

Research from Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) found that skin cancer and melanoma rates differed widely from state to state. This brief examines the rate of skin cancer and melanoma occurrence across the U.S. in 2019.

Research from Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) revealed that men faced a number of health challenges in 2019, and, in many cases, had significantly higher rates of disease than their female counterparts.

The number of individuals with high-cost and very high-cost medical claims is continuing to grow, consuming more and more of the total healthcare spend in the United States. The ability to predict which individuals are on a path to high cost, and which interventions have the best chance of preventing that eventuality, has become critically important.

Almost $1 of every $3 spent in healthcare is wasted on services that have little or no clinical benefit, are potentially harmful, or are delivered in unnecessary high-cost settings. The potential to harm patients may stem directly from the risks of LVC, or indirectly from additional tests and procedures that contain risks and/or have little or no clinical benefit. Blue … Read More

Research from Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) shows that for the last two years, pharmacy (Rx) spending has contributed more than inpatient hospital costs to the total cost of care (TCOC) for commercially insured Americans.