549 – Combined Data and Data Linkage (Surveys + Administrative Data, Geospatial Data, etc.)
Linked Designs of the MEPS Medical Provider and Organization Surveys
Marc Zodet
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Sadeq R. Chowdhury
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Steve Machlin
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Joel Cohen
Agency for HealthCare Research
The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is an ongoing household survey that yields national estimates of various health care metrics; including health care use, expenditures, and insurance coverage. The MEPS also collects information from a sample of health care service providers reported by the household. The medical provider data are an invaluable complement to the household reported data. Often more detailed and accurate, the provider data serve as the gold standard for MEPS expenditure estimates and are the source for MEPS expenditure imputations. Because of increased demand for data on organizational characteristics of providers and/or health care practices, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has sponsored a Medical Organization Survey (MOS) which will collect this type of data from a subset of the MEPS medical provider sample. This paper presents the underlying design considerations of the MOS (e.g., identification of the sampling frame, sample selection, construction of analytic weights, linking of person-level and organization level characteristics) and discusses the analytic potential of the data.