Medicare Announces New Research Data Warehouse

Medicare Announces New Research Data Warehouse

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has established a new research-oriented database, the Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse (CCW).  Data on Medicare beneficiaries is now available for purchase from the CCW to support research studies.

Section 723 of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to make Medicare data more readily available to researchers who are studying chronic illness in the Medicare population.  In response to this requirement, CMS contracted with the Iowa Foundation for Medical Care (IFMC) to establish the Chronic Condition Data Warehouse (CCW).  The CCW is based on the 5% national Medicare sample of beneficiaries; however, unique to the CCW, any beneficiary that enters the cohort will remain in the cohort from that time forward to facilitate longitudinal studies.  The sample allows researchers to follow an individual longitudinally or it allows the researcher the ability to calculate national rates by selecting only those beneficiaries in CMS’s standard 5% sample.  This allows for examination of claims data from all Medicare Fee-for-service care settings, as well as nursing home and home health agency assessment data for the sampled beneficiaries.

The CCW data include Medicare claims, enrollment, and assessment (MDS and OASIS) data and can be linked by beneficiary across years and files.  CCW data files are streamlined to include only those data fields determined by CMS to be useful for research purposes. Research cohorts can be extracted from the CCW data files as random samples, demographic cohorts, many custom cohorts or by a set of 21 predefined chronic health conditions.  In addition to requesting data for these predefined conditions, researchers may submit customized data requests by specifying the applicable data files, time frames, diagnosis and/or procedure codes.  Data are available in ASCII text files or in SAS®, versions 6 or 9, datasets.

The CCW data may be requested from CMS by submitting a Research Identifiable File data request packet.  The CCW data are considered identifiable data files because the source data contain protected health information, and consequently researchers must sign a Data Use Agreement covering the use and protection of the data.  For more information about the CCW data request process or file prices, please contact ResDAC at 888-973-7322 or resdac@umn.edu or through the Internet at www.resdac.umn.edu.  

 
[back to top]