CMS is pleased to announce the availability of a new set of Research Identifiable Files (RIFs) for the Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCAH) waiver program.
The AHCAH initiative, launched in November 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, allows Medicare-certified hospitals to treat patients with inpatient-level care at home. Data contained within the AHCAH data set was collected by CMS directly from individual hospitals on either a weekly or monthly basis depending on their participation tier, which is based on the level of experience the facility has with providing hospital at-home services.
The AHCAH dataset contains two files, a Hospital file and a Patient file, which are both provided for a research request (i.e., cannot be requested separately).
- The Hospital file contains hospital-specific information, including facility location information, the waiver participation tier, and the submission date for the data represented in the file record. The submission date represents the data submitted by the facility for the previous month or week.
- The Patient file contains a record for each AHCAH admission for the patient, and includes other beneficiary-specific data such as the beneficiary’s program eligibility status (Medicare, Medicaid, Dual) and the state Medicaid identifier, if applicable.
Each file contains the monthly or weekly submitted data for each participating hospital for the time period from November 2020 through March 2023 (29 months). A second data release is planned for a future date in 2025.
For more information about the AHCAH waiver program, please see the AHCAH fact sheet at https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/acute-hospital-care-home-data-release-fact-sheet.