The U.S. office-based physician market has experienced substantial changes in recent years. A growing number of office-based physicians are practicing in large group practices, and vertical integration between hospitals and physician group practices through ownership and contractual relationships has accelerated. Understanding how the organizational characteristics of office-based physicians interact with use of care is important to informing policymakers in their efforts to promote efficient healthcare delivery. The association between the number of visits adults make to their USCs and the characteristics of the practices they use may enhance our knowledge of how trends in organizational characteristics impact healthcare utilization.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) supplemental Medical Organizations Survey (MOS) is designed to provide nationally representative estimates of the characteristics of patients’ usual sources of care (USCs) and to support analyses of the association between practice characteristics and patients’ experiences with care, including access to care, service use, quality of care, and expenditures. This is the first Federal survey that has the capability of directly linking practice characteristics with patients’ experiences. The MEPS MOS was funded in part by support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the data were collected for calendar years 2015 and 2016.
The MEPS MOS expands the current Medical Provider Component (MPC) to include information on characteristics of the practices of office-based providers identified by MEPS household respondents as their USC. Research domains included in the MOS survey instrument include practice ownership and size, provider mix, financial incentives, patient mix, access, quality, coordination of care, and use of electronic health/medical record systems. To be eligible for the MOS, a medical provider had to be 1) identified as an office-based USC for a MEPS respondent and 2) seen by the respondent during 2016.
In 2016, an estimated 76 percent of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population 18 years of age or older, about 183.7 million people, had a USC, and of those persons, about 61.6 percent (113.2 million people) saw their USC at least once during the year. The MOS sample was further limited to practices that were office-based (representing about 95 percent of the people who saw their USC, or the USC practices associated with 107.3 million adults) (data not shown).
Under these criteria, estimates presented in this Statistical Brief reflect the characteristics of people in the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population who had a USC that was a physician in an office-based setting and who visited that USC in 2016 (hereafter referred to as “adults with a USC” or “USC adults”).
Note that visits to office-based physicians are influenced by factors such as patient health, age, sex, and insurance status. This Statistical Brief does not make any adjustments for person characteristics that may be correlated with the number of adult visits. Only differences that are statistically significant at the .05 level or better are discussed in the Statistical Brief.