Are you able to identify the individual drug that a person is taking using the MEPS data?

If I wanted to know what percent of the MEPS population was taking lisinopril for instance, is that something I could extract from the database? Or does it only provide me with the number of Rx medications a person is taking without providing the name of those medications.

It appears that IPUMS MEPS just has a count of all prescribed medications purchased during the year (RXPRMEDSNO). For specific medications, you may want to look into the prescribed medicine files provided by AHRQ, which are available here.

Thanks Michelle

Hi Michelle, how is the RXPRMEDSNO variable created? I saw the quantity of the medications and the quantity unit from the prescribed medicine files (data from MEPS website). I am not sure how to understand the count of the prescribed medications. Does this variable indicate the number of events the individual had? No matter whether the medications are the same each event?

RXPRMEDSNO reports the count of all fills and refills of prescribed medications that the person obtained during the calendar year. This variable comes from the full-year consolidated (FYC) file that AHRQ releases. Currently, IPUMS MEPS only includes variables from the FYC files; we do not offer the prescribed medicines files through our system yet or use them to generate summary variables (though we hope to do this soon–check back later this year for these data).

Without specific variable names I cannot be certain which variables you are referencing in the prescribed medicines file, but suspect you are referring to the original MEPS variable names RXQUANTY and RXQUANTUNIT. As per the MEPS Prescribed Medicines file documentation for 2018, RXQUANTY is “the quantity of the prescribed medicine dispensed…e.g., number of tablets in the prescription” while RXFRMUNT is the unit associated with that quantity, e.g., capsules, grams, lozenges. I do not believe these variables are used to create the count of prescribed medicines variable (called RXPRMEDSNO in IPUMS MEPS).

To answer your specific questions, based on the descriptions, I suspect that AHRQ derives the counts of prescribed medicines in the FYC data based on the number of records a person has in the prescribed medicines file for a calendar year (each record in the prescribed medicines file is a prescribed medicine reported by the respondent as having been obtained by a member of the household). Additionally, because this count includes refills, you can think of it as continuing to increment up even if it is the same medication (e.g., a refill). I hope this helps!

1 Like