Mental Health Claims Stop Growing as Share of Telehealth Utilization Drops

Mental health claims continue to encompass a huge share of telehealth utilization in the U.S. But for the first time this year, that share of telehealth claims shrank — a little.

This comes within an incremental, but months-long decline in overall telehealth utilization in the U.S., according to new data from New York City-based nonprofit FAIR Health’s Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker.

Mental health conditions continued to remain the top-ranking diagnoses and procedures within the telehealth claims data nationwide. But the share of mental health claims among all telehealth claims fell by less than one percentage point, from 61.3% in June to 60.7% in July.

The percentage of mental health claims had been rising every month since January, the release states. This decline of mental health claims among telehealth claims applies to all U.S. regions except for the Northeast.

Here are the top five mental health diagnoses in July:

In June, telehealth utilization made up 4.5% of all claims from certain private health insurance claims sources, including Medicare Advantage. That fell to 4.2% of all claims nationwide in July. Telehealth utilization fell the most in the South, falling by 11.4% from June to July.

Nationwide telehealth utilization dipped by 6.7% from June to July, the latest data available. And telehealth utilization diminished by 10% from May to June, according to a news release from AIR Health.

There was also a very slight change-up in the top 5 billed codes among all claims in the data in July: 30-minute established outpatient visits moved to No. 2 from No. 3 while 40-minute established outpatient visits moved from No. 2 to No. 3. The rest, all related psychotherapy, remained unchanged:

Top five billed procedure codes, July 2021

Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker uses FAIR Health data to demonstrate changes within telehealth on a month-to-month basis and reveals in specific terms how the pandemic has change telehealth utilization.

It was launched by FAIR Health in May 2020 and is based on a growing body of private health insurance claim data that grows at a clip of about 2 billion claims records a year and now totals over 35 billion claims records.