Creating Medicare and Medicaid Research Files to Augment Census Survey Data

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-supported 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 SBIR/STTR project is to expand MedRIC?s efforts to include data sets collected by the U.S. Census. In partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, this STTR project will develop a strategy for creating research supplements based on Medicare and Medicaid administrative files matched to several prominent Census surveys that incorporate protocols necessary for satisfying restrictive Title 13 prohibitions on data distribution. To meet the goals of this project, Phase I will accomplish eight specific tasks: (1) establish protocols for data access and privacy, satisfying the confidentiality requirements of Census and CMS; (2) identify alternative methodologies for linking information about beneficiaries across Medicare and Medicaid data sources consistent with Census? special protocols; (3) evaluate the merits of carrying out linkages of Medicare/Medicaid data for the Census surveys CPS, ACS, NHIS, and SIPP; (4) conduct a pilot project assessing the effectiveness of the Census-compatible linking methodologies using Medicare and/or Medicaid files; (5) produce plans for the development of research data structures that incorporate information from Medicare/Medicaid administrative data sources into Census survey files; (6) formulate plans for extensive data documentation to make constructed variables easily understood and retrievable by researchers; (7) investigate options for integrating Medicare/Medicaid information into Census? newly-established projects that are being developed to facilitate access to confidential data through web-based applications that restrict the reporting of results; and (8) prepare plans for MedRIC?s computer infrastructure needed for data storage and extraction.