Overview of the SEER—Medicare Health Outcomes Survey Linked Dataset

The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)—Medicare Health Outcomes Survey (MHOS) links cancer registry data with survey data from Medicare managed care enrollees. The linked file includes clinical information about the cancer with self-reported data about symptoms, functional status and health–related quality of life (HRQOL) for Medicare managed care enrollees. This article provides a description of the SEER-MHOS data as a tool to study cancer among Medicare enrollees. In order to highlight the strengths of the database, we also present some descriptive statistics from the database.