Person-Based Estimates for Emergency Room Visits. To enhance analyses of emergency room visits, analysts may link information about emergency room visits by sample persons in this file to the annual full year consolidated file (which has data for all MEPS sample persons), or conversely, link person-level information from the full year consolidated file to this event-level file (see Section 5 below for more details). Both this file and the full year consolidated file may be used to derive estimates for persons with emergency room care and annual estimates of total expenditures. However, if the estimate relates to the entire population, this file cannot be used to calculate the denominator, as only those persons with at least one emergency room event are represented on this data file. Therefore, the full year consolidated file must be used for person-level analyses that include both persons with and without emergency room care.
