Ask HN: Who works with Medicare claims data (VRDC)?

1 point

2 years ago

I am very curious about the community around the Medicare VRDC. Do you work with the VRDC? Let's share our tips, tricks and code. I for one have written an R package (https://github.com/fabkury/phea/) that is useful inside the VRDC.

## For those who don't know about the VRDC:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) release every quarter billions of health insurance claims from tens of millions of beneficiaries through their Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC, https://resdac.org/cms-virtual-research-data-center-vrdc). Access costs $40k/year for the project fee, plus $15k/year per additional user and other optional add-ons.

The VRDC offers both Databricks and SAS environments for data manipulations. A few months ago, they started also offering optional compute units where users can launch their own R or Python scripts, as opposed to working through Databricks.

1 comment