We can confirm: this was a particularly bad flu season
Oscar Health’s flu season analysis
This piece was co-authored by Keerthi Reddy
According to the CDC, 3.7% of Americans saw a healthcare provider for flu-like symptoms this year. And while Spring is officially upon us, the flu is still hanging on — with 34 states still reporting widespread flu activity. Common consensus says that it’s been a particularly brutal flu season, but as a data-driven insurer, we at Oscar Health wanted to see whether our analysis could confirm this.
As we approach the end of flu season, we now have a good idea of how our own members fared. Because we process our members’ claims, and because they engage with us on a regular basis, we’re able to tie many disparate data points together to guide our members to better care. To conduct a quick analysis of the flu season, we looked at our members’ prescriptions for flu vaccines to see how many were initially immunized against it, and for flu diagnoses and prescriptions to develop a rough estimate of how many members had contracted the flu.
Some Caveats
Of course, flu season is still going, which means some claims for flu drug prescriptions have yet to come in. Additionally, our numbers are likely underreported due to the fact that some of our members might have chosen to wait out the flu in bed in lieu of calling in or visiting a doctor for medication. Finally, we only can account for some percentage of actual vaccinations: some people get vaccinated through work or other organizations that offer the same free vaccines that Oscar does.
That being said, our data still told a story of a bad flu season. And because our full-stack claims infrastructure enables us to quickly gather data from across our entire membership — regardless of market or product line — we were able to get a fairly complete picture. Here’s some of what we found:
Members were over twice as likely to get the flu this year in January and February than they were in 2017.
Flu drug prescriptions peaked at around 1.9% in January of 2018, but unlike in past years, it remained high in February (at 1.6% vs. .8% in 2017). The flu season is clearly lasting later than in years past, with already 1.6% of members reporting flu symptoms before the end of the month.
Most members contracted the flu around 2 months past the peak vaccination month. Our vaccinations peaked in October, and our members’ flu season peaked in January.
This year, 2.5 times the amount of people who’d received the flu vaccine still got the flu compared to the prior year.
While simply understanding the data is useful, its value is tenfold when we’re able to act on it. At Oscar, we can reach out to our sicker or more vulnerable patients who get the flu and make sure they’re being treated properly. Additionally, flu shots are covered for Oscar members, so in future years, we can look at prior patterns and target specific groups of vulnerable people to get flu shots.
