BSA SNF Beneficiary PUF

This release contains the Basic Stand Alone (BSA) Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Beneficiary Public Use Files (PUF) with information from Medicare SNF claims. The CMS BSA SNF Beneficiary PUF is a beneficiary-level file in which each record is a beneficiary who had at least one SNF claim from a random 5% sample of Medicare beneficiaries. There are some demographic and claim-related variables provided in this PUF.

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

In addition to the General documentation file, there are two documentation files for each SNF Beneficiary 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.