Health Data Store

Health Data Store

Questions?

Contact Health Data Specialist,
Emily Birmingham

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collects and releases data for all U.S. hospital inpatient stays for Medicare beneficiaries. These data are released annually in the CMS Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) file. Each record in the MedPAR file represents an inpatient stay during the calendar year of the file and has information on diagnosis, procedure, charge, payment, provider and patient for the claim. Some useful data elements include:

  • Patient age group, sex and race

  • Hospital provider number

  • Length of stay

  • 5 categories of accommodation charges

  • Diagnosis codes

  • Up to 6 surgical procedure codes

  • Charge and payment data

All hospitals receiving funds from Medicare must submit their data to CMS. In the most recent year available over 6,000 hospitals had data reported in the MedPAR file. RPC holds these files from 2006 to 2020.

Data Applications

We can provide custom reports, graphs and maps using this data file and combining it with other health care and demographic files. The tabulations and analysis RPC offers based on MedPAR data has many potential uses for healthcare planners, financial analysts, and hospital executives. RPC offers custom reports using the MedPAR data, and our consultants are happy to talk to you about how we can use the file to best meet your needs.

Data Suppression and Restrictions

The MedPAR data is only specific to state-of-origin level for patients. In addition, patient age is reported by categories rather than exact age, and admission and discharge dates are reported as quarters. Because of data use restrictions, RPC cannot sell access to the raw data, but can provide a wide array of tabulations and descriptive statistics using the MedPAR file.