Identifying cohabiting couples in administrative data: evidence from Medicare address data

Using Address Data to Track Household Financial Burden of Disease

“…These data currently exist, and could vastly expand our knowledge of the financial burden of illness at the household level, but are currently extremely difficult to access. For example, Matta et al 12 identify couples in Medicare claims data who share an exact address and zip code history. This process took >4 years to complete between negotiating data use agreements, using geographic information systems to clean text-based address fields that were not designed for research use, and developing the couple algorithm.…”