Creating Research Files from CMS Data for Integration with Survey Data

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This STTR proposal to the National Institute on Aging (NIA) requests funding to expand the capabilities of the Medicare Research Information Center (MedRIC) recently established by Acumen LLC with earlier support from NIA. The purpose of MedRIC is to facilitate the acquisition and linking of administrative data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to participants of surveys and registries sponsored by NIH and other federal agencies. Through expanding the capacities of MedRIC, Acumen will establish an infrastructure capable of vastly reducing the costs and burdens that researchers must bear to attain and use CMS administrative data in conjunction with popular federally-funded surveys/registries. To date, MedRIC's activities have focused on linking functional research files derived from Medicare data to NIA-supported surveys. The aim of this new SBIR/STTR is to extend this linkage of Medicare data to incorporate information from two addition CMS data sources: (i) Medicaid enrollment and claims files, and (ii) the Minimum Data Set (MDS)?which describes the circumstances of nursing home residents. MedRIC will carry out this effort with several prominent NIA-supported surveys as project partners. To meet the goals of this project, Phase I will accomplish seven specific tasks: (1) formalize arrangements with CMS for adding the MDS and parts of Medicaid enrollment and claims files to the data inventories of MedRIC; (2) develop an approach for linking information about beneficiaries across the different health administrative data sources maintained by CMS (i.e., across Medicare, MDS and Medicaid); (3) conduct a pilot project demonstrating the effectiveness of the linkage approach created in Task 2; (4) work with CMS and our project survey partners?which include HRS, PSID and NLTCS?to establish protocols that maintain data privacy, recognizing that each survey must satisfy not only a common set but also its own unique confidentially requirements; (5) complete plans for the creation of several ?standardized? research data structures processed from the raw CMS administrative files, formulated to integrate information across several administrative sources and to meet the needs of a broad range of researchers and policy analysts; (6) prepare plans for comprehensive data documentation to make specific data elements easily understood and retrievable by potential users; and (7) produce plans for the computer infrastructure needed for data storage, linkage and extraction.