This public use file is one in a series of event-level public use files drawn from the
2018 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). Released as an ASCII file with SAS,
SPSS, STATA and R programming statements a SAS transport file, a SAS V9 file, a XLSX file, and a Stata file, the Hospital Inpatient Stays File provides
detailed information on hospital inpatient stays. Data are gathered from a nationally representative sample
of the civilian, noninstitutionalized population of the United States and can be used to make estimates of
inpatient hospital stay utilizations and expenditures for calendar year 2018. Each record represents one
household-reported inpatient hospital stay reported during the 2018 portion of round 3 and rounds 4 and 5
for Panel 22, as well as rounds 1, 2 and the 2018 portion of round 3 for Panel 23 of the survey
(i.e., the rounds for the MEPS panels covering calendar year 2018). The Hospital Inpatient Stays Public
Use Data File is an event-level data file containing characteristics associated with the hospital inpatient
stay event such as: the date of the hospital inpatient stay, reason for the stay, types of services received,
whether or not medicines were prescribed, and imputed expenditure data.
Starting in 2018, instead of the XPORT engine, the CPORT procedure is used to create MEPS Public Use Files (PUFS)
in transport format (excluding the 2018 Point-in-Time file, HC-036, and HC-036BRR). These CPORT data files
(.ssp) cannot be read directly into R or Stata at this time. The ASCII (.dat) data file format can be used
instead, along with the corresponding instructions found in the 'Programming Statements' files. In addition,
SAS users must use the CIMPORT procedure to restore the transport files (.ssp) into SAS data sets. For more
details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the
MEPS GitHub page. Update notes
*The PDF version of the codebook is recommended for printing; the HTML version is database driven and lets you navigate quickly to details on each variable.
**Right-click on the data file link, then select Save Target As or Save Link As to download the file.
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