Initial Insights into Covid-19 Patients from Medical Claims Data

Perception Health, a leading provider of data intelligence services for the healthcare industry, recently analyzed de-identified medical claims records to compile an analysis of patients diagnosed with the coronavirus Covid-19.
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In March 2020, Perception Health began to compile and study data related to Covid-19. Initially, without official HCPCS/CPT or ICD-10 codes for the diagnosis of Covid-19, the company began a daily reporting process that included state and county data extraction and also published volume predictions that held true through April and into May.
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In April 2020, CMS released the following diagnosis codes for identifying active patients with Covid-19:

Beginning in April, Perception Health began a process to filter Covid-19 claims and pull these claims into a separate database for ongoing analysis. Below is the early data and descriptive analytics associated with the complete patient histories of the active Covid-19 patients.

Total Unique Active Patients

67,797 active patients were selected for the study during the week of May 10, 2020. We filtered all patient histories to retroactively find the following co-morbidities associated with the patient population reviewed:

Co-morbidities

• 21,263 of these patients had hypertension (31%)
• 14,706 of these patients had diabetes (21%)
• 12,103 of these patients had hyperlipidemia (18%)
• 12,924 of these patients had a cancer diagnosis (19%)

Cancer Co-morbidities

• Breast Cancer - 1,077 (8%)
• Gastrointestinal - 2,808 (22%)
• Genitourinary - 1,297 (10%)
• Gynecological - 2,383 (18%)
• Skin/Melanoma - 3,270 (25%)
• Respiratory - 440 (3%)

Other Insights

• 14,209 of these patients received the flu vaccine in the last 4 years (21%)
• The mean number of claims per patient in the prior 4 years is 149 and the median is 65
• There are 11,748 codes presenting an extremely diverse array of procedures
• The top 5 procedures together represent only 13.92% of the overall procedures performed
• The top 2 (99213 / 99214) refer to a general outpatient procedure
• The third most common refers to outpatient personal care services
• The fourth refers to Routine Venipuncture and/or Collection of Specimens
• The fifth is a progress note documentation

Provider Profiles

• Teladoc was the top rendering NPI among the active patients
• 578 (0.85%) of these patients had undergone one or more previous hospitalizations
• 83 territories are represented in this data set. A very small number of rendering NPIs are international, including Japan, Thailand, Canada, and the UK.

This is the first of many weekly Covid-19 data briefs Perception Health will post to assist researchers, providers, and policy makers in our combined efforts against the pandemic.

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