Hi!
My name is Mo, and I am interested looking at the expenditures / charges for ED visits where the patient was discharged on the SAME day (I don’t want to look at anything related to inpatient expenditures / charges). Is there a specific variable for this?
Can the expenditures / charges be further broken down by the age of the patient?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
The MEPS collects information about panel participants’ medical events by directly interviewing medical providers. Data for each medical event, including the type of event and its related expenses, is recorded on its own event-level record. All of these records are associated with a panel participant. The variable EVENTYPE categorizes seven separate types of medical events, including ED/ER visits (EVENTYPE = 3) and hospital inpatient stays (EVENTYPE = 4), and can be used to identify the events you are interested in analyzing. An ED/ER visit that develops into an inpatient hospital stay is identified as two separate events, one for the ED/ER event and one for the stay. Since expenditures are reported for each individual event, you can obtain expenses for ED/ER events separately (see EVEXPSRCFAC for payments billed to facilities and EVEXPSRCDR for payments billed to doctors). You can also determine which inpatient stays are linked to an ER/ED visit using the variable EMERROOM.
All of these variables that I mentioned are on the event-level record, meaning that you will need to request a hierarchical data extract in order to add them to your data cart (see our note on extract data structures). The option to switch data structures is available on the right side of the variable selection menu. In a hierarchical extract, event records are nested underneath person records. Event-level variables, such as EVENTYPE, will appear on the associated event record. The person record will report any person-level variables that you add to your data extract such as AGE, which you can then use to differentiate between adult and pediatric medical events.