medicare_utils

Scripts to assist working with Medicare data.

• Free software: MIT license
• Documentation: medicare-utils.readthedocs.io.

Features

Provides the class MedicareDF. This class contains some canned scripts to make common tasks easier. It currently contains two functions:

• get_cohort(), which uses the beneficiary summary file to find a set of medicare beneficiaries according to options given to the function.
• search_for_codes(), which searches for HCPCS, ICD-9 diagnosis, and/or ICD-9 procedure codes in a given type of file.

Installation

Install the package with:

pip install git+https://github.com/kylebarron/medicare_utils --upgrade

You'll also need to manually install the python-snappy package. This is easiest with:

conda install -c conda-forge python-snappy

Otherwise you need to first install the Snappy C library and then run

pip install python-snappy

Usage

The class is initialized with

import medicare_utils as med
mdf = med.MedicareDF('05', range(2010, 2013))
mdf.get_cohort(gender='female', ages=range(65, 75))
mdf.search_for_codes(2010, 'med', icd9_diag='41071')

It has attributes that refer to different levels of the data, when applicable:

• mdf.pl: patient-level data. Here the index of the data is bene_id for data post-2005, or ehic for data pre-2005.
• mdf.cl: claim-level data.