The Home Health Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) contains data items that were developed for measuring patient outcomes for the purpose of performance improvement in home health care. Medicare certified home care agencies are required to conduct patient-specific comprehensive assessments at specified time points. The data are collected at start of care, 60-day follow-ups, and discharge (and surrounding an inpatient facility stay).

OASIS data items address socio-demographic, environmental, support system, health status, functional status, and health service utilization characteristics of the patient.

Data Available: OASIS data from CMS are available starting in July 1999.

To request these data researchers need to submit to CMS a data request packet.

Resource links:

• CMS's OASIS Implementation Manual provides background and context of OASIS
  
  
  • Chapter 4 contains information about the patients assessed, details of every item, as well as the data collection time points.
  • Chapter 8 contains information about the "rules" observed in collecting and recording data, the meaning of each OASIS item, and how OASIS data are collected in the context of the comprehensive assessment.
  
  
  
• OASIS assessment tracking forms
  
  
  • OASIS collected after December 2002: OASIS-B1 (12/2002)
  • OASIS collected between October 2000 and December 2002: OASIS B-1 (8/2000)
  • OASIS collected prior to October 2000: OASIS B-1 (10/1998)
  
  
  
• OASIS Chronicle Summary (Chapter 3 of Volume 4 of the National OBQI Demonstration Final Report) contains an excellent variable by variable resource for researchers wanting more information about individual OASIS data variables.
  
  
  
• Risk-adjusted Home Health Outcome Report includes national and state means for all measures. Each state mean is calculated across all patients served by home health agencies certified in that state. Documentation on individual reports and measures accompanies each report.