BSA Hospice Beneficiary PUF

This release contains the Basic Stand Alone (BSA) Hospice Beneficiary Public Use Files (PUF) with information from Medicare hospice claims. The CMS BSA Hospice Beneficiary PUF is a beneficiary-level file in which each record is a beneficiary who had at least one hospice claim from a random 5% sample of Medicare beneficiaries. There are some demographic and claim-related variables provided in this PUF.

The CMS BSA Hospice Beneficiary 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 Hospice Beneficiary 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 Hospice Beneficiary PUF and the 5% CMS research sample. It is also disjoint from other CMS BSA PUFs (i.e., CMS 2008 Inpatient Claims PUF, CMS 2008 DME Line Items PUF, and CMS 2008 PDE 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 each Hospice Beneficiary 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.