Summary of Medicare Payments to Family Physicians in Ohio

This graph breaks down the average billing category revenue amounts by Quartile of Total Revenues for Family Physicians in Ohio for 2012.  (This is not a “per provider” average, but an average revenue earned by providers providing that service in that category in that quartile.)

There are several interesting points:

1. Family Physicians in the higher Medicare Revenue bracket generally provide more patient care:
   • More Office visits
   • More Nursing Home visits
   • More Home Health visits
   • More Hospital and ER services
2. There are also some interesting outliers:
   • PathLab: DrugTst
     • A single physician provider providing Drug Confirmation Testing
   • MedP: OthrSvcs
     • A small number of physicians are providing Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
   • MedP: Neurol
     • About 34 physicians providing neuromuscular testing and sleep study services

I plan to refresh this analysis and look at average category revenues by quartile on a “per provider” basis.

This analysis was done in R & RStudio on an Ubuntu Linux platform using linked PostgreSQL to subset the 2012 Medicare Payments data by physician specialty and location.  A pattern match selection using regular expressions was used to supercategorize the CPT codes into broader categories (Critical Care, Home Health, Hospital Inpatient, …).

ggplot2 was used to generate the graphics.

Thank you to the Coursera Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization series, the R & RStudio as well as the PostgreSQL communities for their great open source tools and guidance.