BSA DME Line Items PUF

This release contains the Basic Stand Alone (BSA) Durable Medical Equipment (DME) Line Items Public Use File (PUF) named “CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF” with information from 2008 Medicare DME claims. The CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF is a line item level file in which each record is a line item of a DME claim incurred by a 5% sample of Medicare beneficiaries (each claim is comprised of up to 13 line item services). Some demographic and line item related variables are provided in this PUF as detailed below. However, as beneficiary identities are not provided, it is not possible to link claims that belong to the same beneficiary in the CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF. It is also not possible to link line item services that belong to the same claim.

The CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF originates from a 5% simple random sample of beneficiaries drawn (without replacement) from the 100% Beneficiary Summary File for reference year 2008. The sample that is used for the CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items 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 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF and the 5% CMS research sample. It is also disjoint from the other BSA PUFs (i.e., CMS 2008 Inpatient Claims PUF, CMS 2008 PDE PUF, and CMS 2008 Hospice Beneficiary PUF) that have been released so far. This property prevents users from linking data across multiple files for identification purposes.

CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF contains seven (7) variables. A primary record (i.e., line item) key indexing the line items and six (6) analytic variables, listed below.

• Gender (BENE_SEX_IDENT_CD): The beneficiary's gender, (1) male or (2) female.
• Age (BENE_AGE_CAT_CD): The beneficiary's age, reported in six categories: (1) under 65, (2) 65 - 69, (3) 70 - 74, (4) 75-79, (5) 80-84, (6) 85 and older.
• ICD-9 primary diagnosis code (DME_LINE_ICD9_DGNS_CD): “International Classification of Diseases” version 9. This is a three-digit code (four-digit for “E” ICD-9 diagnosis codes). In the PUF, 426 such codes are observed.
• HCPCS code (DME_LINE_HCPCS_CD): These are HCPCS Level II codes and take on 1,118 possible codes values in the CMS 2008 BSA DME Line Items PUF. It identifies a supply, procedure or service.
• Count of services (DME_LINE_SRVC_CNT) is a count of the total number of services associated with the line item, ranging from 1 to 999.
• Medicare Payment Amount (DME_LINE_PMT_AMT): Medicare payment is rounded according to certain rounding rules. Note that a payment amount between $0 and $4.99 is rounded to $0 according to the rounding rules.

In addition to the General documentation file, there are two documentation files for the DME 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.