The data, posted online in spreadsheets for thousands of procedures, is incomprehensible and unusable by patients — a hodgepodge of numbers and technical medica

The data, posted online in spreadsheets for thousands of procedures, is incomprehensible and unusable by patients — a hodgepodge of numbers and technical medical terms, displayed in formats that vary from hospital to hospital. It is nearly impossible for consumers to compare prices for the same service at different hospitals because no two hospitals seem to describe services in the same way. Nor can consumers divine how much they will have to pay out of pocket. I took a look at the Vanderbilt charges[0] mentioned at the top of the article. If they could at least provide proper medical codes for procedures like they did in the drugs export, that would make it a lot easier to cross reference procedures/etc. between hospitals. You can look through my comment history on my complaints about it, but if these csv files or pdfs were generated with jasper reports or mirth connect (any other integration engine), its a shame that they missed out on either one extra column or one extra join to get all their corresponding codes in their exports. To the other comments' points, yeah someone could go ahead and start cross referencing codes, if they were all there, but the problem is that most systems are usually behind in code systems (e.g ICD9 vs ICD10) or they are made up using their own internal codes. You might end up with yet another set of standard codes that you would have to map to the official codes. Here are some value sets[1] that are listed on the HL7 site. If anyone did want to tackle this problem, start there to at least get a baseline in the types of labels/descriptions you will be seeing across the board. [0] https://finance.vumc.org/chargemaster/ https://finance.vumc.org/chargemaster/ [1] http://hl7.org/fhir/us/core/terminology.html http://hl7.org/fhir/us/core/terminology.html CPT - https://www.ama-assn.org/amaone/cpt-current-procedural-terminology https://www.ama-assn.org/amaone/cpt-current-procedural-termi... SNOMED - http://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/get-snomed http://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/get-snomed ICD-10 - https://www.icd10data.com/ https://www.icd10data.com/ RXNORM - https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/ https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/