I recently posted in r/datasets and read some articles (including in the one in this subreddit from a couple of days ago) about how the price transparency data released by hospitals was, very difficult to understand, even for a machine. Every hospital seemed to have their own idea (or lack thereof) of how this data should look. Few had even included codes. From my very minimal understanding of healthcare I suspect this was intentional. It's a shame that CMS did not require some standardization and was so vague in their directions. I pulled a couple of examples and you don't need to be an expert to see that even a machine would have trouble:
The discussion we had in r/datasets focused on the technical side of things - how to collect and standardize the data. There was a lot of enthusiasm but there was not a lot of input on the subject matter side. I apologize if some of these questions have already been answered:
1) The vast majority of people do not use price shopping tools related to hospitals even when they are accessible, why is that? How accurate are these tools? /u/zombicat doesn't think they are.
2) If a patient were to price shop, would it be mostly for imaging stuff? What other things could they price shop for? I've read that there are outpatient locations that specialize in imaging and are already being transparent about their cash prices - is this true?
3) What is the difference between the data in an all payer claims database (APCD) versus this new hospital data? Who has access to APCD?
4) Is this data even useful? There is a big difference between what the hospital charges insurance versus what the patient will actually pay. Is there anyway to back into what the patient will pay from the new hospital data?
A few us think we can tackle the problem from the technical side, is there anybody on the healthcare side interested in taking a look at the data and seeing if there is a way we can make sense of it and make it useful?
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