Arkansas Medicare Data Dictionary Resources

Arkansas Medicare data is available for state directed/state funded projects.  Arkansas Medicare data are also considered claims based data however these data are kept in their native state where possible.  It can be used to support standard or custom data requests.  If a custom data request includes new derived or aggregated fields, additional documentation will be provided when the data request is fulfilled with definitions and/or methodologies supporting these fields.

Arkansas Medicare beneficiary and claims data are provided in their native layout and have not been transformed to the Arkansas APCD layout. Available data elements are listed in the Arkansas Medicare Data Dictionary Element List spreadsheet.  Each Arkansas Medicare data category is represented in a separate tab.

Arkansas Medicare data is sourced from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) and the Research Data Center (ResDAC).  These organizations have made available online information and data dictionaries that better represent the Arkansas Medicare data definitions. To find a data element definition, select the data element from the Arkansas Medicare Data Dictionary Element List spreadsheet and search for it at one of the resources in Table 2.

Table 2: Arkansas Medicare Data Dictionary Resources

Resource	Link

Resource	Link
ResDac	https://www.resdac.org/
CMS Chronic Conditions Warehouse (CCW)	https://www.ccwdata.org/web/guest/data-dictionaries Open
CMS Part D Users Guide	CMS Part D Users Guide
Additional User Guides CMS Medicare Part D Plan Characteristics Codebook 2018 CMS Medicare Part D Formulary File Codebook 2022 CMS Medicare FFS Plan Characteristics Codebook 2022	Open Open Open

If a data element cannot be located at either of these sites, search for it using an internet search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.  If it still cannot be located, contact Arkansas APCD Technical Support.