Concordance of household and provider reported medical conditions in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is a unique data source that can be used to produce national estimates and analyses of health care utilization and expenditures associated with specific medical conditions. Information on medical conditions is collected from respondents to the Household Component (HC) of the survey and can be tied to specific ambulatory and inpatient medical events that are also reported in the HC. The MEPS Medical Provider Component (MPC) provides a unique opportunity to assess the quality of data reported in a household survey on medical conditions. While the primary purpose of the MPC is to collect medical expenditure data from providers to improve the completeness and accuracy of HC expense information, data are also collected in the MPC on medical conditions treated. These data will often be more accurate and complete than the HC data because they reflect medical diagnoses by health care providers rather than reports from survey respondents (i.e., the patient themselves or a family member). Using matched HC-MPC data for medical care reported in MEPS, we assess the extent to which medical conditions reported in the HC are corroborated by data reported in the MPC. We examine consistency between the two sources for broad groupings of condition type and for acute versus chronic conditions. The results will help inform whether and the extent to which there may be misclassification bias in analyses that rely on household reported medical condition data.