MEPS Workshop

This repository contains the agenda, presentation slides, and programming exercises for the latest MEPS workshop.

MEPS workshops are designed for health services researchers who have a background or interest in using national health surveys. For questions regarding MEPS workshops, please contact Anita Soni at [email protected]. Information on upcoming workshops is posted on the MEPS website. Check back regularly for updates.

More information about the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and additional coding information and exercises can be found in the MEPS repository.

Helper programs

To facilitate the programming exercises, the following programs can be used to automate the downloading, unzipping, and conversion of the MEPS data files into SAS:

• sas_exercises/Automate_Load_SAS_Files.sas
• sas_exercises/Automate_Load_Transport_Files.sas

Programming exercises

The SAS, Stata, and R programming exercises are available in the sas_exercises, stata_exercises and r_exercises folders:

Exercise 1

National healthcare expenses, including:

1. Overall expenses (National totals)
2. Percentage of persons with an expense
3. Mean expense per person
4. Mean/median expense per person with an expense, by age group

Exercise 2

Purchases and expenses for narcotic analgesics or narcotic analgesic combos including:

1. Number of purchases (fills)
2. Total expenditures
3. Out-of-pocket payments
4. Third-party payments

Exercise 3

This program illustrates how to pool MEPS data files from different years. The example calculates:

1. Percentage of people with Joint Pain / Arthritis (JTPAIN**, ARTHDX)
2. Average expenditures per person, by Joint Pain status (TOTEXP, TOTSLF)

Exercise 4

This program includes a regression example for persons receiving a flu shot in the last 12 months, including:

1. Percentage of people with a flu shot
2. Logistic regression: to identify demographic factors associated with receiving a flu shot