Enhancing the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Data on Medicaid Beneficiaries Through Data Linkage

• Activity Number: 548
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Lisa Mirel*+ and Jeffrey Gonzalez
• Companies: and AHRQ
• Keywords: Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) ; Dental ; Data Linkage ; National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) ; Medicaid

Abstract

The MEPS Household Component (MEPS-HC) is a complex, multi-stage, nationally representative sample of the U.S. civilian non-institutionalized population. Each year a new sample is drawn as a subsample of households from the prior year's National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The MEPS-HC and the NHIS integrated design enable the indirect linkage of some MEPS-HC participants to Medicaid administrative records which offers innovative opportunities to assess survey quality and improve imputation methodology. This paper looks at outcomes based on MEPS participants that linked to administrative records, using data from the NCHS data linkage program. Focusing on the Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) files, we analyzed dental visits. We describe the utility of linked data for validating survey reporting, assessing expenditure estimates, and improving imputation methods in MEPS-HC. We also discuss plans for future work in this area.