Data associated with the publication: Geographic regions enriched with frail older adults

Frail individuals are at particular risk in public health emergencies. Information about the concentration of frail individuals is expected to be valuable to health departments and other organizations with resources to deploy such as shelter, hospital beds, and ventilators. Additionally, researchers benefit from granular measures of frailty in communities for health services research or community-based research. We aimed to generate the probability of frailty for 100% of U.S. Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. using a claims-based frailty index and describe the regional prevalence of frailty. We used a cross-sectional design using data from April through October 2015. We included 100% of Medicare beneficiaries with parts A and B coverage (n= 31,609,883) and calculated the probability of frailty using a validated claims-based frailty index. We report the prevalence of frail adults within each census division, state, county and U.S. zip code as the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries with a frailty probability greater than 20%. This dataset is our estimate of the percent of frail individuals (in 2015) for each zip code and county in the U.S. We anticipate this data set is useful for health services researchers and for individuals planning services. The estimates at the level of the census division and state are available in the published manuscript.