National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey: 1995 summary.

OBJECTIVE: This report describes ambulatory care visits made to physician offices within the United States. Statistics are presented on selected physician patient, and visit characteristics for aggregated ambulatory care visits.

METHODS: The data presented in this report were collected from the 1995 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS). NAMCS is part of the ambulatory care component of the National Health Care Survey, which measures health care utilization across various types of providers. NAMCS is a national probability survey of visits to office-based physicians in the United States. Sample data were weighted to produce annual estimates.

RESULTS: During 1995, an estimated 697.1 million visits were made to physician offices in the United States, an overall rate of 2.7 visits per person. One quarter of the NAMCS visits were made to general and family physicians, which was significantly higher than the other 13 specialties. Persons 75 years of age and over had the highest rate of physician office visits 5.9 visits per person. Females had a significantly higher rate of visits to physician offices than males did overall, as did white persons compared with black persons. Of all visits made to these offices in 1995, 86% were covered by some form of insurance, and 11 percent were paid "out-of-pocket." There were an estimated 81.6 million injury-related visits during 1995, or 31.2 visits per 100 persons. A significantly higher proportion of injury visits were made by white persons compared with black persons. Over two-thirds of all injury visits were for unintentional injuries.