The Visit file provides demographic and summary information about an entire day s worth of outpatient encounters. It was created in FY 1980, but at that time contained only very basic utilization data and almost no patient demographic variables. Two of these changes are worthy of special note. Encounter information is transmitted to the AAC nightly where they are held in a queue until used to update the SAS files are updated twice a month. Austin permits the reloading of any and all records from a site within the same fiscal year and with closeout tolerances.
Many sites retransmit the entire load at the end of the fiscal year.
This field is left blank unless the case is a pseudo SSN, in which case a P is included along with numeric equivalents of the patient's initials and birth date. However, real SSNs are still stored, at the AAC, in accessible SAS datasets. Previous to 1996, year of birth was available and used for age calculations. This variable was originally formatted into eight groupings. Previous to 1996, year of birth was available and used for age calculations.