Characteristics of Practices Used as Usual Source of Care Providers during 2015 – Results from the MEPS Medical Organizations Survey

Excerpt

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 organizational characteristics of office based physicians and how they interact with quality and costs of care is imperative when discussing policies to promote high-quality and efficient health care delivery.

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 (USC) 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 the first time for calendar year 2015.

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 2015.

In 2015, an estimated 80 percent of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population, about 249.6 million people, had a USC, and of those persons, about 44.1 percent (110.1 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 92 percent of the people who saw their USC, or the USC practices associated with 101.2 million people, data not shown).

Under these criteria, estimates presented in this 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 2015 (hereafter referred to as "patients with a USC" or "USC patients").