Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

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MEPS HC-206G: 2018 Office-Based Medical Provider Visits File

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Release date: June 2020

	Notes on viewing and downloading files
	Printing tips

This public use data file is one in a series of event-level public use data 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 Medical Provider Visits File provides detailed information on office-based medical provider 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 office-based medical provider utilizations and expenditures for calendar year 2018. Each record represents one household-reported office-based medical provider 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 Office-Based Provider Public Use Data File contains characteristics associated with the office-based visit, such as, date of the visit, time spent with the provider, types of treatment and services received, types of medicine prescribed, 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 (588 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (202 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (39 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (11 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (15 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (5.9 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (3.2 MB) / EXE (3.7 MB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (3.6 MB) / EXE (4.1 MB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (4.4 MB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (4.5 MB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (20 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.