PPI Expands Indexes for Health Care Services by Payer Type : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Bureau of Labor Statistics > Producer Price Indexes > About > Notices

PPI Expands Indexes for Health Care Services by Payer Type

Payer-type indexes for specific health care services

Effective with the release of Producer Price Index (PPI) data for July 2014, the PPI program expanded the industry and commodity (wherever-provided) data publication structures for health care services to provide detailed service line indexes based on payer type. (See table 1 and table 2 for the lists of aggregate indexes affected by this change. Previously, the PPI had only published payer-type indexes for general medical and surgical hospitals, home health care services, and nursing care facilities.) This expansion introduces payer-specific index series that measure price changes within each health care service aggregate index when adequate revenue data and price quotation information exist to differentiate by payer type. For example, table 3 provides the new commodity-based structure for physician care, which encompasses detailed indexes for Medicare patients, Medicaid patients, private insurance patients, and all other patients. To facilitate calculation of these indexes, price quotations for health care services have been assigned to payer-type indexes based on the payer of the plurality of the expected reimbursement.

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**Table 1. Industry-based health care indexes with data organized by payer type**
Industry code	Industry title
621111	Offices of physicians, except mental health
621210	Offices of dentists
621511	Medical laboratories
621512	Diagnostic imaging centers
621610	Home health care services
622110	General medical and surgical hospitals
622210	Psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals
622310	Other specialty hospitals
623110	Nursing care facilities
623210	Residential developmental disability homes
NOTE: For NAICS 621111, offices of physicians, detailed indexes by payer type do not publish. Payer-type indexes for physician services are available as commodity indexes under code 511101. Payer-type indexes are not provided for 621991, Blood and organ banks, because that industry index measures transactions between blood banks and health care service providers. ↩ Return to text

**Table 2. Commodity-based health care indexes with data organized by payer type**
Commodity code	Commodity title
511101	Physician care
511102	Medical laboratory care and diagnostic imaging center care
511103	Home health and hospice care
511104	Hospital outpatient care
511105	Dental care
512101	Hospital inpatient care
512102	Nursing home care
512103	Intellectual and developmental disability center care
NOTE: Payer-type indexes are not provided for PPI commodity code 513101, Sales of blood and blood products, organs and tissues, because that index measures transactions between blood banks and health care service providers. ↩ Return to text

**Table 3. PPI Commodity structure for physician care by payer type**
Commodity code	Commodity title
511101	Physician care
51110102	Medicare patients: physician care
51110103	Medicaid patients: physician care
51110104	Private insurance patients: physician care
51110105	All other patients: physician care
↩ Return to text

**Table 4. PPI Special Indexes for Health care services by payer type**
Commodity code	Commodity title	Relative importance
SIHCARE1	Health care services, Medicare patients	26.121
SIHCARE2	Health care services, Medicaid patients	18.093
SIHCARE3	Health care services, private insurance patients	39.305
SIHCARE4	Health care services, all other patients	16.480
↩ Return to text

Aggregate health care indexes for Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and other payers

The expansion of payer-type detail for commodity indexes allows for the calculation of four new aggregate indexes organized by payer type. These indexes, along with their respective relative importance figures as of June 2014, are listed in table 4. These aggregate indexes are constructed using the detailed payer-type commodity indexes for specific health care services listed in table 2. The weightings of the component commodity indexes are used to calculate the aggregate indexes by payer type. As with almost all PPI commodity indexes, the primary data source for index weights is revenue data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Census). Secondary data sources were used to apportion the Census data by payer type. These new indexes will allow data users to evaluate health care inflation for different patient populations. For example, the Health care services, Medicare patients index combines price data for transactions from the various commodity indexes listed in table 2, where the primary payer is Medicare.

Get data

Data for these indexes appear in tables 11 and 13 of the PPI Detailed Report and are available online through the PPI Commodity Database.

For more information

For further information about PPI Health care services indexes, contact John Lucier at Lucier.John@bls.gov or Jason Carnival at Carnival.Jason@bls.gov. For general PPI information, contact the PPI Section of Index Analysis and Public Information at ppi-info@bls.gov or (202) 691-7705.

Last Modified Date: August 15, 2014