The Online Survey Certification and Reporting (OSCAR) file is an administrative database of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, formerly the Health Care Financing Administration. Prior acronyms for the OSCAR file have included MMACS, POS, RADARS, and MADARS.

To download the OSCAR SNF file layout, and related forms, click here.

The administrative purpose of OSCAR is to support the survey and certification function. Thus, every "institutional" health care provider in the United States that is certified to provide services under either Medicare or Medicaid (or both) is listed in OSCAR.

Different types of providers have to report different information during the survey and certification process. As a result, OSCAR is a very rich source of information on some types of providers and not on others. The number of variables in the file reflects the intensity of the survey process for that provider type. The most extensive data in OSCAR is for nursing homes, due to the fact that the nursing home survey process is quite rigorous. There are approximately seven hundred variables in OSCAR for each nursing home! To see a sample, click here.

When facilities are surveyed, the new survey data overwrites the previous data, limiting the usefulness of OSCAR as a research database. To eliminate this problem, Cowles Research Group (CRG) routinely purchases and archives the complete OSCAR database. An overview of the contents of OSCAR's nursing home database can be found in the Nursing Home Statistical Yearbooks.

For more information about OSCAR, please contact us.