BSA Outpatient Procedures PUF

This release contains the Basic Stand Alone (BSA) Outpatient Procedures Public Use Files (PUF) with information from Medicare outpatient claims. The CMS BSA Outpatient Procedures PUF is a procedure-level file in which each record is a procedure in an outpatient claim incurred by a 5% sample of Medicare beneficiaries. There are some demographic and claim-related variables provided in this PUF as detailed below. However, as claim or beneficiary identities are not provided, it is not possible to link procedures that belong to the same claim or beneficiary.

The CMS BSA Outpatient Procedures PUF originates from a 5% simple random sample of beneficiaries drawn (without replacement) from the 100% Beneficiary Summary File for the reference year. The sample that is used for the CMS BSA Outpatient Procedures PUF is disjoint from the existing 5% CMS research sample in the sense that there is no overlap in terms of the beneficiaries in the CMS BSA Outpatient Procedures PUF and the 5% CMS research sample. It is also disjoint from the other BSA PUFs (i.e., CMS 2008 Inpatient Claims PUF, CMS 2008 PDE PUF, CMS 2008 DME Line Items PUF, and CMS 2008 Hospice Beneficiary PUF, CMS 2008 SNF Beneficiary PUF, CMS 2008 HHA Beneficiary PUF, and CMS 2008 Carrier Line Items PUF) that have been released so far. This property prevents users from linking data across multiple files for identification purposes.

In addition to the General documentation file, there are two documentation files for the Outpatient Procedure PUF:

1. The data dictionary and codebook file contains information about each variable on the file and its values, as well as formatted frequencies for each variable on the data file.
2. A data users document which gives the file layout for the downloadable CSV file, as well as SAS program code for creating a SAS dataset with variable formats.