The medicare package is a collection of functions and methods I’ve used to manipulate Medicare data and get it ready for analysis. This includes things like efficiently subsetting messy Cost Report data to pull desired variables, renaming variables in data that doesn’t come with headers, and finding more useful names for Provider of Service files from the early 2000’s that name variables sequentially from “PROV0001”.
Publicly available Medicare data often requires extensive preparation
and cleaning before any analysis can take place. Files are often raw
dumps of database tables, which the researcher is expected to subset and
merge to make a workable dataset. This package contains methods to
extract data from such datasets (e.g. Cost
Reports), provide useful names for variables (Cost Reports and Provider
of Services File), and even parse data dictionary / layout files to
extract variable names for older datasets, where names in the raw data
are essentially Var1, Var2, Var3... (Provider of Services
File).
medicare is under active development and available on
CRAN. You can install the latest release version of the package by
using
install.packages("medicare")You can install the development version of the medicare
package using devtools:
library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("robertgambrel/medicare")Please let me know about any problems by opening an issue.
For detailed examples on how to use some of the functionality, check out the Vignettes, which show examples similar to what I’ve done in my own work.
browseVignettes(package="medicare")