Medicare Health Outcomes Survey (HOS), 1998-2014 (ICPSR 23380)

1. Cohorts 1-5 contain the Baseline Data, the Follow-Up Data, and the Analytic Data file, which contains the merged Baseline and Follow-Up files along with supplemental variables. Beginning with Cohort 6, the Follow-Up Data were no longer produced separately and were included only in the Analytic Data file.

2. Cohort 9 (2006-2008) only contains Baseline data at this time.

3. According to the principal investigators, the value "MM" in the survey mode variable, formerly known as survey round number, was not used consistently by the HOS survey vendors since telephone follow-up of incomplete mail surveys is often utilized, with a subsequent "MT" survey mode assignment.

4. For the variables corresponding to the Healthy Days questions, NCQA allowed the vendors to enter invalid values into the database when respondents indicated a response of more than 30 days. However, values greater than 30 were excluded from all analyses involving the three healthy days questions in the reports.

5. The HOS questionnaire contains multiple skip patterns. Caution should be exercised when examining selected questions that involve skip pattern responses. Please refer to the User Guide for additional information on skip patterns.

6. For comprehensive information on the history and progress of the Medicare HOS Program, including the full spectrum of available data and reports, please visit the Medicare Health Outcomes Survey Web site.

7. Demographic variables in the baseline survey (age, race, marital status, education level) were collapsed by the principal investigators to ensure the confidentiality of the respondents. Information on how to gain access to HOS nonidentifiable data, identifiable data, and limited data set files is available via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Web site.

8. The CASE_ID identifier assigned to a beneficiary in the analytic public use files does not correspond to any identifier that may be assigned to the same beneficiary in either a baseline public use file or other analytic public use files.

9. Any file names referenced in the user guides are not applicable to the ICPSR release of the data.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Monthly Report of Managed Care Health Plans

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Enrollment Database

• United States Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Medicare Health Outcomes Survey (HOS), 1998-2014. ICPSR23380-v3. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-05-26. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR23380.v3

2016-05-26 Baseline and analytic data for cohorts 14 and 15 have been added to the collection and documentation was updated to account for title change.

2014-11-13 Baseline and analytic data for cohorts 10 through 13 have been added to the collection and documentation was updated to account for title change.

2009-07-22 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

• Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.