Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

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MEPS HC-206F: 2018 Outpatient 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 Outpatient Visits File provides detailed information on outpatient 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 outpatient utilizations and expenditures for calendar year 2018. Each record represents one household-reported outpatient 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 Outpatient Visits Public Use Data File contains characteristics associated with the outpatient visit such as the date of the visit, whether or not a doctor was seen, type of care received, type of services provided, expenditures, and sources of payment.

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 (418 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (259 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (44 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (12 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (16 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (6.3 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (629 KB) / EXE (1.1 MB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (667 KB) / EXE (1.2 MB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (770 KB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (791 KB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (2.6 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.