1992-2016 Good Hospital Matrix

One of the challenges in conducting longitudinal data analysis on Medicare data is to compare patterns of care among hospitals over time, as in the course of one or many years, hospitals can: merge, split into multiple entities, close altogether, new hospitals can open, or they can change into long-term care facilities. Each year, the Atlas team creates a master hospital cross-reference resource file that lists the number of beds, discharges, and various other fields from 1992 through the most recent year of data for each provider (provider is used as a synonym of hospital in the CMS files). From this master resource file, a Hospital Transition Matrix is created indicating changes in provider ID over time. This master file includes short-stay hospitals, long-term, psych and rehab hospitals and excludes Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs), VA and other federal institutions and non-US providers.