Finding Married Couples in Medicare Claims Data

Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology - Tập 3 - Trang 75-86 - 2002
Theodore J. Iwashyna1, Gerardine Brennan2, James X. Zhang3, Nicholas A. Christakis4
1Department of Medicine, Hospital, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
2Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
3Department of Community and Family Medicine, School of Public Health, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China
4Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

Tóm tắt

Medicare claims data have proven extraordinarily useful for the cost-effective examination of many epidemiologic and health services research problems. However, their richness in utilization and health status details is offset by a lack of social information. In this paper, we review a method to uniquely link husbands and wives using only data already present in the Medicare claims, allowing the construction of couple-level health care utilization histories. We compare the ability of this method to detect couples to married elderly couples identified in the 1990 Census, and find that it detects at least 59% of couples overall, with only modest variation as a function of the age or age-difference. There appears to be modestly lower detection of Black couples and those in coastal states. We discuss how comparison groups of the widowed can be developed to study the effects of marriage and bereavement on health care use and outcomes.

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Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology

Tập 3

75-86

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