Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

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MEPS HC-229D: 2021 Hospital Inpatient Stays File

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Release date: June 2023

	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 2021 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). Released as an ASCII file with SAS, SPSS, and STATA and R programming statements, 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 utilization and expenditures for calendar year 2021. Each record comprises data for one household-reported inpatient hospital stay collected during the 2021 portion of Round 7, and all of Rounds 8 and 9 for Panel 23; the 2021 portion of Rounds 5 and 7, and all of Round 6 for Panel 24; the 2021 portion of Round 3 and all of Rounds 4 and 5 for Panel 25; and Rounds 1, 2, and the 2021 portion of Round 3 for Panel 26 (i.e., the rounds for the MEPS panels covering the calendar year 2021). This year, 2021, is the first data year to include four panels of data. Because of concerns about lower response rates due to COVID-19, Panels 23 and 24 were extended to include 9 rounds of data collection; data for Rounds 7, 8, and 9 for Panel 23 and Rounds 5, 6, and 7 for Panel 24 are included in the 2021 data files. The Hospital Inpatient Stays File contains data on several characteristics associated with each hospital inpatient stay, including the start and ends dates for the hospital inpatient stay, the number of nights spent in the hospital, the reason for admittance, whether or not a doctor was seen, types of services received, medicines prescribed at discharge, expenditures, and sources of payment. To append person-level information such as demographic or health insurance coverage to each event record, data from this file can be merged with the 2021 MEPS HC Full-Year Consolidated file using the person identifier, DUPERSID. For more details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the MEPS GitHub page

Documentation

File type

Documentation	PDF (484 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (156 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (39 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (8.2 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (11 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (8.3 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (140 KB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (173 KB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (193 KB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (168 KB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (444 KB)

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.