This public use file is one in a series of event-level public use files drawn from the 2020 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). Released as an ASCII file with SAS, SPSS, and STATA, and R programming statements, a 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 2020. Each record represents one household-reported outpatient visit from Rounds 6-7 for Panel 23, Rounds 3-5 for Panel 24, and Rounds 1-3 for Panel 25 (i.e., the rounds for the MEPS panels covering calendar year 2020). This year, 2020, is the first data year to include three panels of data; Panel 23 was extended to include Rounds 6 and 7. 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. For more details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the MEPS GitHub page.
*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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