Hello Everyone,

I have a random sampling question and was hoping you'd be able to help.

I have a dataset with 14,400 unique patients variables are MRN, Age, Gender, Provider_Name and several others. Out of the 14,400 patients I will need to randomly select 1,000 patients. I then will need to divide that 1,000 patients into 2 groups of 500 patients. First group of 500, we will send an outreach letter to. The 2nd group, we will do nothing with, but only use for comparisons to the 1st group.

Is there a way to randomly select 1,000 patients where it is evenly distributed among Gender, Age, and Provider_Name? I don't want my sample size to be more females than males or too many younger age or majority are from a handful of providers. I want a somewhat random, but stratified sample size. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this either in SAS mainframe 8.2 or MS Excel?

Dataset FINALPOP has the following variables:

MRN Age (age >= 55) Gender (M, F) Provider_Name (28 providers/doctors total)

Thank you in advance for your time and suggestions.

Sen

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