Medicare Documentation

This repository holds documentation on the Medicare data held at the NBER.

Developing

Adding documentation

All the documentation is written in markdown format. Here's a helpful cheatsheet for how to do formatting in markdown. It's all really intuitive.

The site layout is determined by the pages section of mkdocs.yml:

pages:
    - Home: 'index.md'
    - NBER Documentation:
        - Overview: 'NBER_website/1_Overview.md'
        - Description of Claims Files: 'NBER_website/2_Background.md'
        - Getting Started with SAS: 'NBER_website/3_Getting_started_with_SAS.md'
        - Constructing Extracts with SAS: 'NBER_website/4_constructing_extracts.md'
        - Manipulating Extracts with SAS: 'NBER_website/5_manipulating_medicare_extracts.md'
        - Generating Costs Measures: 'NBER_website/6_costs.md'
        - References: 'NBER_website/7_references.md'
        - Appendix: 'NBER_website/8_appendix.md'
    - ResDAC Documentation:
        - Beneficiary Summary File: 'resdac/mbsf.md'
        - Carrier RIF: 'resdac/carrier-rif.md'
        - Denominator RIF: 'resdac/denominator-rif.md'
        - Durable Medical Equipment RIF: 'resdac/dme-rif.md'
        - Home Health Agency RIF: 'resdac/hha-rif.md'
        - Hospice RIF: 'resdac/hospice-rif.md'
        - Inpatient RIF: 'resdac/ip-rif.md'
        - MedPAR RIF: 'resdac/medpar-rif.md'
        - Outpatient RIF: 'resdac/op-rif.md'
        - Skilled Nursing Facility RIF: 'resdac/snf-rif.md'
        - Variable Definitions: 'resdac/variables.md'
    - Working with the Data:
        - Goals for New Data Format: 'kyle/goals-for-modern-data-format.md'
        - Standard Readme: 'kyle/01medicare_readme.md'
        - Data Extraction Overview: 'kyle/extract_data.md'
        - Data Locations: 'kyle/data_locations.md'
        - Python Extraction: 'kyle/python_extract.md'
        - Using tmux for long-running jobs: 'kyle/using-tmux-aging-servers.md'
    - Important Details:
        - Enrollment Restrictions: 'mauricio/enrollment-restrictions.md'
        - Calculating Costs for Inpatient Visits: 'mauricio/lag-post-event-spending.md'
    - Glossary: 'glossary.md'

This layout is subject to change.

• NBER Documentation: Files ported from the NBER website
• ResDAC Documentation: Files scraped from ResDAC. The resdac-scrape.py program scrapes the website and automatically populates the files in docs/resdac/. Therefore, don't edit any files in docs/resdac/ as your edits will be overwritten.
• The rest of the files are currently a mish mash.

Serving the site locally

This website uses mkdocs, a Markdown site generator, with the mkdocs-material theme. To serve the site locally, first make sure you have Python 3 installed, and then do:

$ pip install mkdocs mkdocs-material

If you're at the top-level folder, with the mkdocs.yml file in the current directory, you can do mkdocs serve and the website will be running at localhost:8000. So open up your web browser, type in localhost:8000, click enter, and the site will appear.

You can also do mkdocs --help to see all available commands.

> mkdocs --help
Usage: mkdocs [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  MkDocs - Project documentation with Markdown.

Options:
  -V, --version  Show the version and exit.
  -q, --quiet    Silence warnings
  -v, --verbose  Enable verbose output
  -h, --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  build      Build the MkDocs documentation
  gh-deploy  Deploy your documentation to GitHub Pages
  new        Create a new MkDocs project
  serve      Run the builtin development server