Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

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MEPS HC-206E: 2018 Emergency Room Visits File

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Release date: June 2020

	Notes on viewing and downloading files
	Printing tips

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 SAS transport file, a SAS V9 file, a XLSX file, and a Stata file, the Emergency Room Visits File provides detailed information on emergency room visits. 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 emergency room utilizations and expenditures for calendar year 2018. Each record represents one household-reported emergency room visit 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 Emergency Room Visits Public Use Data File contains characteristics associated with the emergency room visit, such as, the date of the visit, types of care and services received, types of medicine prescribed during the visit, expenditures, and sources of payment associated with the visit.

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

Documentation

File type

Documentation	PDF (610 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (227 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (41 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (9.4 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (13 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (6.2 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (319 KB) / EXE (855 KB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (349 KB) / EXE (885 KB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (397 KB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (396 KB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (1.0 MB)

Questionnaires — see Survey Questionnaires
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.