US Hospital Price Comparison Tool

Feedback and Developments
1

I was recently looking for a price comparison tool for medical procedures in the United States. Hospitals were recently required to start publishing their prices. But the one comparison tool I found did not work in my area.

The price data are mandated to be machine-readable. So, I thought this might be of interest to Mojeek.

If Mojeek created a search function that recognized when someone was searching for medical procedures and offered to compare prices, I think that would be helpful and unique.

There are a lot of problems with the U.S. health care system in general and with this idea specifically. But I thought a fair trade-off would be to limit the ingested data to the public, machine-readable data published by the hospitals under the recent rule; and to warn about known pitfalls like not getting credit for out-of-pocket expenses when paying “cash prices” and out-of-date or incomplete price estimates.

But, overall, I think consumers can benefit from a quick way to compare the available data. And Mojeek can benefit from additional searches.

Mike

References

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2

Mike is on to something here. It would be unique and helpful since US healthcare is so Byzantine.

3

That indeed sounds like an important and worthwhile problem to solve. And where there is opportunity. I had a business with offices in California and Texas betwen 1991 and 2005 so am somewaht aware of the costs/damage/issues. I’ll bet it’s not improved. It’s probably too narrow for Mojeek to want to tackle alone, and given other priorities. Possibly a good opportunity for a startup to tackle head-on and work with us; probably as an API customer/partner. Machine readable can cover a lot of ways and formats, so level of homogeneity matters (more) to us. I don’t suppose everyone is using the same schema.

4

In connection with that NBC Bay Area television segment, there is a small company that offers some information. But it is focused on California: probably because of limited money.

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5

Interesting. This is the sort of challenge where it makes sense to start on a niche; so covering just California is likely a good way to get started. A big enough market to suceed with and then scale up. It’s a data challenge led by a data scientist so they look like a credible team. Crawling/scraping will be just one of their challenges in collecting data.

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