The FAIR Health Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker has found that telehealth use varies per region in the United States’s southeast. The Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker, which will be offered as a free service starting in May 2020, leverages FAIR Health data to track the development of telehealth over time. A user of the tracker may examine an infographic on telehealth in a certain month for the country as a whole or for specific regions using an interactive map of the four US census regions. Each infographic displays the top five telemedicine procedure codes, diagnoses, and specializations for that month as well as variations in the percentage of medical claim lines that are telehealth-related from month to month. Additionally, a single telehealth treatment code is highlighted, together with its median charge amount and median authorized amount, in the Telehealth Cost Corner.
Researchers discovered that the usage of telehealth grew in the Midwest, the South, and the West in three of the four US census areas when they compared data from June and July 2022. With a 0.4 percent rise in the incidence of telehealth in medical claim lines, the West recorded the greatest growth, at 5.7 percent. The usage of telehealth increased by 4.9 percent in the South and by 2.5 percent in the Midwest. However, telehealth usage decreased 3.3 percent in the Northeast. Utilization of telehealth nationwide grew by 1.9 percent. In medical claim lines, telehealth usage climbed by 0.1 percent to 5.3 percent in July from 5.2 percent in June.
Social workers continued to lead all areas and nationally in terms of specialities most likely to use telehealth, as they have since February. However, the number of telehealth claim lines for this specialty decreased by 8.7 percent in the South. In this area, telehealth use among psychiatrists rose by 8.1 percent concurrently. Research also indicated that, in the Midwest, primary care non-physicians and psychologists traded places on the list of the top telehealth specializations in July. However, in the Northeast, joint and soft tissue disorders joined the top five telehealth diagnosis list in July as acute respiratory illnesses and infections were removed from the list. Endocrine and metabolic disorders have replaced acute respiratory infections and diseases as the top five telehealth diagnoses in the West. Finally, the tracker also indicated that there were no modifications to process codes in July. As it has been for the previous five months, CPT 90837, an hour of psychotherapy, was the most popular telehealth procedure code.
