Data

Medicare Claims | Health and Retirement Study | National Health and Aging Trends Study | Other Data | Coding

Medicare Claims

ResDAC
Research Data Assistance Center (ResDAC) provides access to CMS data as well as a variety of resources for education and training, including in person workshops, online webinars and videos, articles, and national conferences.

Chronic Conditions Warehouse (CCW)
Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse provides researchers with Medicare and Medicaid beneficiary, claims, and assessment data linked by beneficiary across the continuum of care. CCW is designed to make data more readily available to support research designed to improve the quality of care and reduce costs and utilization. (DUA required)

Additional Resources:

Working with Medicare Claims Data Workshop
This presentation provides general tips for how to work with Medicare data, including an overview of enrollment and file structure, sample selection, and considerations for identifying drug users and disease cohorts.

Chronic Conditions Package
The Chronic Conditions Warehouse (ccwdata.org) applies validated algorithms for discerning multiple chronic conditions in Medicare claims data, and CMS provides the results of their application with Medicare claims data if requested. This macro package provides SAS code for the CCW-validated algorithms (the default option), but also has the flexibility for the user to apply the algorithm to a different set of diagnoses and procedures.

Medicare Data Access Presentation
This presentation describes what data is available from Centers of Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) as of March 10, 2021 and how to gain access to those data.

Administrative Claims and Other Data Holdings
This presentation gives an overview of different types of healthcare data, including claims, electronic health records, and surveys. It then dives deeper into the structure and contents of Medicare claims and private insurer claims.

Health and Retirement Study

HRS Data Portal
Health and Retirement Study (HRS) Data Portal provides HRS data and other downloadable products. Data comes from HRS survey data, RAND HRS Data, Gateway HRS Data, HRS Sensitive Health Data, HRS dbGaP Data, Researcher Contributions and Replication Data, Cognitive Economics Study Data, and Special Access Downloads. The RAND HRS Longitudinal File is a cleaned and streamlined data product containing information from Core and Exit Interviews of the HRS Study, with derived variables covering a large range of topics. (DUA required for restricted files)

Langa-Weir Classification of Cognitive Function in HRS

National Health and Aging Trends Study

NHATS/NSOC
National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) gathers information on a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 and older. NHATS provides user guides, technical papers, instruments, instrument-variable crosswalks, data collection materials, and video tutorials. The National Study of Caregiving (NSOC), begun in 2011, periodically gathers information on family and unpaid caregivers to participants in the NHATS. (DUA required for restricted data files, including NSOC)

Classification of Persons by Dementia Status in the National Health and Aging Trends Study. Kasper, J, Freedman, V & Spillman, B. (2013)

Other Data

Contextual Data Resource  
The Contextual Data Resource (CDR) is a collection of user-friendly datasets that enable researchers to study the impact of place on health and well-being among HRS respondents. CDR includes measures representing seven key theoretical dimensions of the socioenvironmental context; socioeconomic/demographic structure, economic conditions, social stressors, health care, physical hazards, amenities, and the built environment. Measures are available at various levels of geography (e.g., census tract, county, metro area, state) and include proximity measures constructed using respondent geocoded address information (e.g., buffer density measures and distance measures). Currently measures are available for the period 1990-2016, with some measures available on an annual basis and others available at fewer time points.

Center to Accelerate Population Research in Alzheimer’s (CAPRA)
CAPRA creates a publicly available analytic tools that can decrease time to assessing AD/ADRD healthcare administrative and survey data. CAPRA provides cleaned data files (in SAS, Stata and CSV formats), codebooks and programming scripts (SAS and Stata) for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2011-12, 2013-14), National Health Interview Survey (2007-18), Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (2013-18), and Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (2013-18).

Coding

USC Schaeffer Center Data Core
This resource, developed by programmers at the USC Schaeffer Center, provides SAS and Stata code for all papers published by the USC Schaeffer Center Alzheimer’s disease and dementia research group from 2018-2020. Some useful programs include algorithms for identifying incident dementia in Medicare claims and code to calculate number of drug possession days in a year.