Description: In MEPS, hospital care information are collected for each type of hospital setting (emergency room, inpatient, and outpatient department). An outpatient department visit/use/event is any visit made during the person's reference period to a hospital outpatient department, such as a unit of a hospital, or a facility connected with a hospital, providing health and medical services to individuals who receive services from the hospital but do not require hospitalization overnight. Examples of outpatient clinics include well-baby clinics/pediatric OPD; obesity clinics; eye, ear, nose, and throat clinics; family planning clinics; cardiology clinics; internal medicine departments; alcohol and drug abuse clinics; physical therapy clinics; and radiation therapy clinics. Hospital outpatient departments may also provide general primary care. Outpatient expenditures in MEPS are defined as the sum of payments for care received for each emergency room visit, including out-of-pocket payments and payments made by private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and other sources. Outpatient expenditures data may be broken out by facility and separately billing doctor expenditures. Outpatient Department Visits Files are available as part of the event-level files. Information summarized to the person-level is available on the full-year consolidated files under the Household Full Year Files.

Data tables: For tables specifically on outpatient visits and expenditures, go to the Table 7 series of the Expenditures by Health Care Service tables and the Expenditures by Medical Condition tables of the HC Summary Data Tables.

Analytic tools: You can use the MEPSNet/HC query tool to generate your own estimates for outpatient visit/use/event and expenditures. Select the Hospital Outpatient Visits variables within the Utilization, Expenditures, and SOP Variable Group of the Variable Selection Query Tab.