CMS Provider of Services Hospital Data 1993-2017

In this repository you'll find code to process the CMS Provider of Services hospital data. This data provides a host of basic information about hospitals like location, size, teaching status, and type of control (e.g. non-profit, for-profit, government). All hospitals from 1993-2017 are included. For more information, see this page at NBER:

https://www.nber.org/data/provider-of-services.html

The code produces three datasets. The main dataset, pos.dta, has a record for each hospital in each year it appeared in the source data. The remaining two datasets have one record per hospital: pos_firstyear.dta has only the record for the first year it appeared while pos_lastyear.dta has the record for the last year it appeared.

Cautionary Notes!

• Hospitals that close will typically stay in the data in future years. The post-closure records should have a termination code (termcode) and termination date (termdate).
• Hospitals that merge, change subtype, or change type of control will usually get a new provider number. In this case, their old provider number will persist in the data but will get a termination code and date going forward. Keep this in mind when attempting to follow hospitals longitudinally. If you are lucky, the new hospital records will indicate the previous provider number (prev_pn).
• I have heard, but can’t confirm, that CMS rarely updates this data, so the hospital characteristics in it may be quite out of date.
• The variables that count residents (residents) and beds (beds_tot and beds_cert) are very occasionally missing in 2011 and 2012. This issue seems to almost exclusively affect transplant hospitals.
• The variables that indicate the provider subtype e.g. short-term/long-term/etc. (provider_subtype) and type of control e.g. non-profit/for-profit/government (typ_control) are sometimes missing. This issue seems to be limited to certain transplant hospitals, federal hospitals like VA facilities, and Canadian hospitals. Note that indicators I derived from these variables (shortterm, cah, nonprofit, forprofit, govt) will be set to zero in this case.

Download the processed data

I have put the processed Provider of Services data online at the below link:
(Includes data in Stata v15, Stata v12, and CSV formats, plus full variable descriptions for those not using Stata.)

http://sacarny.com/public-files/provider-of-services/latest/provider-of-services.zip

Instructions for processing the data yourself

1. Download the repository using the 'Clone or download' link on github, or clone this repository with the git command: git clone https://github.com/asacarny/provider-of-services.git
2. Download the source data from NBER and put it into the source/ subfolder. You have two options for this.
   1. Shell script: If you are on Mac/Linux/Cygwin, I made a shell script to download the files. Edit the file download_source.sh to set your start/end year and the method you'll use to retrieve the data (wget or rsync, though rsync will only work for those with an NBER username). Then open a terminal, cd to your repository folder, and run bash download_source.sh.
   2. By hand: Make a folder in the repository called source/. Go to http://www.nber.org/data/provider-of-services.html and download the Stata "Other" files in .dta format for the years you want. For pre-2011 years, make sure to download the PROV links.
3. Edit the pos.do file so that the start/end years match the years of data you downloaded in the previous step.
4. Open stata, change its working directory to the repository, and run do pos.do