Research Databases at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

This session will provide an introduction to the research databases at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). In particular, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) will be described with specific applications to health economics research. The MEPS is a vital national data resource designed to continually provide health services researchers, policymakers, health care administrators, businesses, and others with timely, comprehensive information about health care use and costs in the United States. Participants will be provided with a general overview of the MEPS, a description of available data files, information about on-line data tools, and some examples of the type of research projects the MEPS data can support. HCUP is a family of databases, software tools, and related products. HCUP is developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership. It is the largest collection of multi-year hospital care data in the United States. The databases enable research on a broad range of health issues, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to health care, and outcomes of treatments at the national, State, and local market levels. Participants will be provided with a general overview of the project as well as a description of the various data files including the State Inpatient Databases, the Nationwide Inpatient Database, the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, the Kids' Inpatient Database, the State Ambulatory Surgery Databases, and the State Emergency Department Databases. The session will also familiarize participants with several HCUP software tools created for use with administrative data including: Cost-to-Charge Ratio Files (converts hospital charges to cost estimates) and Hospital Market Structure File (contains various measures of hospital market competition).