Pilot Study - Uses of Medicare Morbidity Data in Health Effects Research

摘要

This project is a pilot investigation of the practicability of utilizing Social Security Administration (SSA) Medicare morbidity data to supplement mortality data in cancer and other environmentally-related studies. For this study non-confidential data on 1.2 million hospitalizations for 815,000 persons diagnosed as having a neoplasm, respiratory, or digestive disease during 1971, 1972, and 1973 were included. The data are kept current by SSA for their analysis purposes. The Medicare files are the only known source that incorporates all cancer cases systematically, regardless of whether the cancer is fatal. The Files facilitate analysis of possible relationships between emissions of a specific industry and the disease(s) rates for the co-located population. Numerous recommendations are made for applying the Medicare files to additional analyses of environment-to-health relationships. Prominent among these are cancer hospitalization trends, by county, augmented with cancer mortality trends, and available emmissions/monitoring measures to identify areas of cancer increase/decrease possibly related to environmental influences.