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T-MSIS TAF RIF

CMS has Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) Analytic Files (TAF) from which they create Reasearch Identifiiable Files (RIF) to meet the needs of researchers. We're just going to coloquially refer to this data as T-MSIS data (though it's technically the TAF RIF). CMS has provided substantial documentation about the files here.

After reading this page, check out our getting started guide.

Available Data

We have Medicaid data for the following time periods:

Year Purchased Partitioned Files
2016 Y Y Demo, Out, In, Oth, Rx, LTC, Plan, Prov
2017 Y Y Demo, Out, In, Oth, Rx, LTC, Plan, Prov
2018 Y Y Demo, Out, In, Oth, Rx, LTC, Plan, Prov
2019 Y Y Demo, Out, In, Oth, Rx, LTC, Plan, Prov
2020 Y Y Demo, Out, In, Oth, Rx, LTC, Plan, Prov
2021 Y Y Demo, Out, In, Oth, Rx, LTC, Plan, Prov

Data Organization

T-MSIS data initially come as ~1 TB files broken up into several parts. We have partioned the files by year and by state to allow for more manageable chunks of data to be used for initial exploration. The clusters can then scale any analyses to a national level.

The starting point for most projects will be the year-by-state partitioned files, located at /gpfs/milgram/pi/medicaid_lab/data/cms/ingested/TMSIS_TAF/. Within this directory there is a folder for each specific file provided by CMS:

TMSIS_taf/
├── taf_demog_elig_*/
├── taf_inpatient_header/
├── taf_inpatient_line/
├── taf_inpatient_occurrence/
├── taf_long_term_header/
├── taf_long_term_line/
├── taf_long_term_occurrence/
├── taf_other_services_header/
├── taf_other_services_line/
├── taf_other_services_occurrence/
├── taf_rx_header/
├── taf_rx_line/
├── taf_mngd_care_plan_*/
└── taf_prvdr_*/

Within each specific file folder the organization is by state, then year:

taf_demog_elig_base/
├── year=2016/
│   ├── state=AK/
│   │   └── data.parquet
│   ├── state=AL/
│   │   └── data.parquet
│   └── ...
├── year=2017/
│   ├── state=AK/
│   │   └── data.parquet
│   ├── state=AL/
│   │   └── data.parquet
│   └── ...
└── ...

Documentation

ResDAC provides extensive documentation for all of the files. We have maintained the original column names and datatypes, so all the documentation presented on this website applies to the standardized files as well as the raw files. The two codebooks offer fantastic data dictionaries.

Essential documentation:

Additional ResDAC documentation: