Fee Basis Files

The Fee Basis files report financial and limited clinical information on care provided to VA patients by contract providers outside of VA facilities. The files exclude care provided through sharing agreements at university affiliates and care provided at state veteran homes.

There is some overlap between Fee Basis files and standard VA utilization data files. Information on completed hospital stays is eventually added to the PTF Non-VA hospital file. Community nursing home stays appear in both the VA extended care PTF and the DSS outpatient national data extract.

Contents

There are eight Fee Basis files for each fiscal year. Four record details of individual health care services, one each for inpatient stays, inpatient ancillary services and physician payments, outpatient care, and pharmacy. There are separate files for travel reimbursement data and for information on Fee Card holders, veterans who receive long-term outpatient care through the Fee Basis services. Two other files contain information on Fee Basis providers, known as vendors, one for pharmacy vendors and another for all other vendors.

The files contain basic characteristics about care provided, including procedure and surgery codes. Fee Basis records provide a wealth of detail on charges and payments for services. The files can be linked by patient ID to standard VA utilization files.

Resources

HERC Technical Report #18 lists the variables in the Fee Basis files and offers guidance on how to use them for research.

More information available on our Intranet site.

To ensure the protection of VA information, we have restricted access to certain files (denoted by the "lock" icon). Contact HERC to download these restricted files.

• Fee Basis Data: A Guide for Researchers

  Date: 11/6/2007 | Size: 701Kb