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| MEPS HC-206F: 2018 Outpatient Visits File |
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Release date: June 2020
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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
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Update notes
| Documentation |
PDF (418 KB)
/ HTML
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| Codebook |
PDF (259 KB)
/ HTML*
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| 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, ASCII format |
ZIP (629 KB)
/ EXE (1.1 MB)
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| Data File, SAS transport format |
ZIP (667 KB)
/ EXE (1.2 MB)
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| Data File, SAS V9 format |
ZIP (770 KB)
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| Data File, Stata format |
ZIP (791 KB)
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| Data File, XLSX format |
ZIP (2.6 MB)
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— see Survey Questionnaires
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*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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