What's New on the Medicare HOS

General Updates

• New Search Feature Added to the HOS Publications Section. New search features were added to the Publication section to enhance its usefulness for researchers. Changes include searches by keyword(s) and author(s), and drop down boxes for selection by category (Overview, Methodology, Results, Application/Intervention), publication type (Peer Reviewed Article, Technical Report, Manual), and year of publication/technical report submission.


• Implementing the HEDIS® Medicare Health Outcomes Survey: Applying Missing Data Implementation Methods to HOS Household Income Data (PDF, 359 KB) 2009
  The 2009 HOS Cohort 9 Baseline data was used to investigate several missing data imputation methods for self-reported income, which consistently experiences a high rate of missing data in the HOS. This report provides a brief summary of selected statistical methods that use existing information from the HOS data set, applies them to the data for missing income values, and compares results across the various methods. This work is an extension of previous NCQA research that used an external data source for the imputation.


• 1998-2007 Medicare HOS Public Use Files (PUFs) Available in Multiple File Formats. The PUF data files are available for download from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website. ICPSR is a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and is an international consortium of academic institutions and research organizations that maintains a data archive of research files in the social sciences. In addition to the HOS PUFs available from the Research Data Files section of this website, users may download PUFs created in SAS, SPSS, Stata, and tab separated values (TSV) formats from the ICPSR website. The 1998-2007 HOS Cohorts 1-10 Baseline, the 2000-2004 Cohorts 1-5 Follow Up, and the 1998-2000 Cohort 1 Analytic through 2005-2007 Cohort 8 Analytic PUFs are available for download at no cost. A login account and online Terms of Use Agreement are required to download the files.

HOS Partner Updates

• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
  • overseeing the 2010 Round 13 survey administration (Cohort 13 Baseline, Cohort 11 Follow Up, and HOS-Modified)
  • overseeing administration of the 2009 Round 12 survey data analysis and reporting (Cohort 12 Baseline, Cohort 10 Follow Up, and HOS-Modified)
  
  
• Center for the Assessment of Pharmaceutical Practices at the Boston University School of Public Health (Formerly Health Outcomes Technology Program [HOT])
  • completed a systems comparison study of geographic variations between the Veterans Health Administration and the Medicare Advantage programs
  
  
• Health Services Advisory Group (HSAG)
  • currently preparing 2009 Round 12 (2007-2009 Cohort 10 Performance Measurement, 2009 Cohort 12 Baseline, and 2009 HOS-M) data for distribution
  • currently distributing 2007 and 2008 HOS-M data to the participating SNPs and PACE Organizations who request their data
  • currently distributing Performance Measurement data for Cohorts 1 through 9 to those participating MAOs who request their data


• National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA)
  • HEDIS 2010 Volume 6 Specifications for the Medicare Health Outcome Survey manual is available for purchase. Call NCQA Customer Support at 1-888-275-7585 to order.
  • currently fielding the 2010 Round 13 HOS (2010 Cohort 13 Baseline, 2008-2010 Cohort 11 Follow Up, and 2010 HOS-Modified) during April-July
  
  
• RTI International, Social Policy, Health, and Economics Research Unit (RTI)
  • completed the sampling design to select the beneficiary samples for the 2010 Cohort 13 Baseline and Cohort 11 Follow Up surveys