Medical and diagnostic services for people aged 65 and over comprise a
substantial proportion of all services provided by the Health insuran
ce Commission under the Medicare Benefits Schedule. To examine the uti
lisation of these services by people in this age group, we analysed de
-identified data on a cohort of people who claimed for at least one su
ch service in NSW in 1991. The fetal number of services claimed for by
this cohort of 7,724 people was 144,658. The median number of service
s received by individuals during the year was 13.5 per person for the
cohort (or 9.9 for the total group). Of the total services reimbursed,
64.7% were for doctors' consultations, 24.8% were for diagnostic serv
ices and 10.6% were for other services, predominantly operations. The
most common claims were for visits to a general practitioner for a sta
ndard consultation. Service utilisation differed between the age and s
ex categories of the patients in the study sample. Utilisation tended
to increase with age and was more common among women than men for seve
ral of the service groups considered. We report the results of these a
nalyses and discuss the potential benefits and disadvantages of using
claims data to evaluate utilisation of medical and diagnostic services
, and current clinical practices.