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Show HN: I mapped US medical prices. Save thousands by driving a few miles
- ebaum 13y agointeresting idea. cant wait to see what happens next
- ocfx 13y agoInteresting data, but good to note that cheap does not equate with better in the medical field typically.
- jaibot 13y agoIs there evidence of correlation?
- ajiang 13y agoThe next step would be to bring in death/complication statistics by hospital and ratings by surgeon
- phren0logy 13y agoI would hesitate to interpret this so naively. For example, there are some vascular surgeons who take on patients that nobody else will touch. These are patients with many bad prognostic risk factors, but they will die without the surgery. The surgeons who take these patients may end up having terrible stats, but be the most skilled if only because their mortality rate is not pushing 100%. Comparing this statistic the way people compare gas mileage is a disincentive for these surgeons to operate on patients that need help, but are high risk.
- carbocation 13y agoSelection bias (by the physicians) should make that extremely challenging. You could adjust for underlying comorbidities, though that will often not give enough adjustment to make an impartial expert observer feel that it is sufficient.
- refurb 13y agoCMS is actually doing that already (at least for hospitals). Early next year, CMS will post healthcare quality metrics that it's collected from providers who bill to CMS. In 2015, hospitals will start getting reimbursed based on quality, which is a step in the right direction, however, it is chocked with problems (i.e. treating the best patients will advantage a hospital)
- benmaraschino 13y agoSome states already do this. For example, for CABG and valve surgery, NY State publishes raw, as well as risk-adjusted mortality rates (RAMR) broken down by surgeon: (warning, PDF) http://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/cardiovascular/heart_disease/docs/2008-2010_adult_cardiac_surgery.pdf http://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/cardiovascular/... (begins on pg 21) Fun fact: Dr. Oz is in there and it even looks like he might be one of the better performing surgeons too. Another fun fact: it can be hard to draw inferences about individual providers this way; check out just how wide some of the the 95% CIs for the RAMRs are, and a lot hinges on how good your risk adjustment model is (details on pg 13).
- codex 13y agoIf you were a doctor, would you rather charge more, or less? What keeps you from charging the highest fees in the world? Your reputation. If you're not the best, you cannot charge the most. All of capitalism works this way.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoIf you are only doctor performing that procedure in a city... Well you get the point.
- johngrefe 13y agoagreed. How many times have you actually shopped out a procedure by making 10 doctors appointments for checkups and quotes, typically, when they need to operate, you just go with what they say.
- mgkimsal 13y agoI don't go to the doctor much, but when I go I ask "how much will this cost?" and 99% of the time I get "hrmm... I dunno..." and a shrug.
- auctiontheory 13y agoMost doctors in rich (i.e. insured patients) hospitals have no idea. My ENT was quite surprised when I told him the charge (>$1000) for his quick look down my throat. And that was only after a lot of shopping around and negotiating on my part. And it didn't include any "treatment" - it was just to look and possibly diagnose.
- mgkimsal 13y agoI'm usually asking the receptionist or other office person - they handle most of the billing stuff, and the other response I sometimes get is "oh, we have to run it through insurance first". They just run a code, and get told what they'll get paid (apparently), not necessarily what my cost/price is. The system is so fundamentally out of whack, and not at all 'market driven' and yet somehow... my 'free market capitalist conservative republican' friends (I have a few) are really against "socializing" medicine/healthcare. As if, somehow, what we have now in the US is a bastion of free market enterprise. The cynic in me thinks that the conservative elite really really really enjoy having a dependent class, and ensuring people are at the mercy of private health insurance companies vs the federal or state government helps ensure that dependency in a way they can still control. But... I'm overly cynical, it's late, and my words aren't coming out exactly as I think they should. :/
- dshankar 13y agoThis has enormous impact by bringing transparency to medical procedure pricing. One could quite literally save $10-50K by opting to do a procedure just a few miles away. Nice work. Where did you get the data for this? Is it publicly available?
- ajiang 13y agoThis looks like DRG data by hospital released a few months ago by CMS, so what the hospitals bill for to Medicare, although the actual payments are set by CMS. Still, charge master data is the starting point for people not on Medicare/Medicaid
- neilsharma 13y agoThanks. Yeah, a lot of people travel abroad to save money, but its possible to find comparable prices nearby too. Patients aren't trained to shop around with procedures though. The Obama Administration has tried to make pricing more transparent--this particular data set is publicly available. Here it is: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Medicare-Provider-Charge-Data/Inpatient.html https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAs someone with a disabled mother on medicaid (whom I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on for prescriptions and care), thank you.
- doorty 13y agoGreat first step. And pretty soon we'll have quality of care reviews--from patient questionnaires thanks to ACA/Obama Care.
- neilsharma 13y agoI'm anxious to see those reviews. Quality of care is highly subjective and difficult to measure. Patient reviews are probably the best thing, but may be skewed on short-term or trivial aspects of the treatment, like how nice a doctor is or the wait-time. It'd need to be more on how a patient recovers over a 3, 6, etc. month period and whether or not they need to be re-treated
- 27182818284 13y agoGreat work! Keep it up!
- dice 13y agoWhat do the numbers and colors of the hospital symbols mean? They do not seem to be correlated with price of procedure.
- neilsharma 13y agoThe price number in the marker is the average cost of the selected procedure at the hospital at that location. A green marker means its the cheapest price within the map's boundaries. Red means its the most expensive. Thanks, I will make that more clear
- enra 13y agoSaw this couple of weeks ago http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/ http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/
- neilsharma 13y agoThanks for the link--haven't seen this. I think they use a different data set for the procedure prices, but I like how they also compare it to a quality ranking. I will look more into how US News quantified hospital scores. What I think matters most for healthcare is not just price, but quality/cost. Quality is difficult to measure, but should factor in recovery speed, number of repeat-procedures, service, etc.
- hotloo 13y agoThanks! I think, when are showing some numbers, it looks much more perceivable when you have something to compare to, in our case, the top hospitals ranking from the US News. Some more work will mostly likely be done soon to enrich the data we are showing.
- carbocation 13y agoInteresting. The prices listed by this tool are very different from the prices listed in the tool in this Show HN post. I wonder how their data differ?
- hotloo 13y agoHi! I went back and checked the data. If you search for chest pain, and look at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center around Santa Monica, we are showing this piece of information. 313 - CHEST PAIN,50625,CEDARS-SINAI MEDICAL CENTER,8700 BEVERLY BLVD,LOS ANGELES,CA,90048,CA - Los Angeles,229,43714.62445,5094.71179 In the PriceMaps we made, we are showing the last value, which is the 'Average Total Payments' for the operation. Not exactly sure if the site mentioned in the HN is using the same data.
- johngrefe 13y agoSo freaking cool.
- hardwaresofton 13y agoThis is fantastic, clear, concise, and helpful, with a simple UI.
- neilsharma 13y agoThanks! The goal was to shed some light on price discrepancies within the US, and not just the US vs other countries.
- awjr 13y agoWould it be useful to have a 'show me the cheapest' button? The range in cost hints at the massive variance. The US is crazy. How does a procedure costing 4k in one place cost 120k in another?
- greyfade 13y agoIt doesn't. The price is set by a Chargemaster list that is drawn up by a committee. Hospitals are free to charge whatever they want above that, without any downward market forces. Paying more sometimes means better outpatient treatment (and sometimes lower readmittance rates), but it's not a guarantor.
- neilsharma 13y agoThanks for the feedback. My next goal is to look more into why the price varies so much. The price spread is pretty crazy. Some hospitals have higher fixed costs or salaries depending on the geography. Also, if a hospital is more research-oriented, R&D funds are normally tacked onto the price (one of the reasons why Stanford's Hospital is really expensive). It's hard to find quantifiable data on the breakdown of bills, but based on a great article in Time a few months ago, prices are almost entirely arbitrarily defined: http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/08/an-end-to-medical-billing-secrecy/ http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/08/an-end-to-medical-billi...
- refurb 13y agoThe cost adjustments you're talking about are MS-DRG adjustments (the amount the hospital actually gets paid by CMS). From what I can gather, the numbers on the website, are cost numbers, i.e. what the hospital tells CMS it costs them (which is a number they are free to make whatever). If you want to know why costs vary so much, starting looking at reimbursement. Hospitals are incentivized to raise their list prices because many of them are paid a set percentage.
- neilsharma 13y agoI thought medicare reimbursement is relatively fixed, with minor fluctuations based on geography and some hospital-specific practices? Based on a rough glance at the data, it seems like medicare reimbursement is only loosely correlated with the cost numbers, so I don't know how much raising prices would increase their Medicare revenue. Also, from what I've learned about elderly care, Medicare reimburses a care center a fixed amount ($5000/mon/patient in California) regardless of the severity of the case. I'm assuming this number varies a bit too even in the same region. As a side note, if you click on any of the prices in the map, it'll show you medicare's reimbursement rates too. Should've made that feature more clear--it's rather important.
- dougmccune 13y agoWhat's the consumer use for this? Is it for people without insurance? From what I understand this is the rate that Medicare has negotiated from these providers. But I assume this isn't for people with Medicare, since those people are covered with Medicare. I assume the dollar values don't have much relation to the reality that an uninsured individual would be billed, since Medicare negotiates pretty aggressively for prices that "normal" people or even normal insurance plans can't get. I'm just not understanding what you learn from this other than what Medicare gets reimbursed. And I'm not understanding how knowing that is actionable in any way for the average person.
- npalli 13y agoEven with insurance your coinsurance could be up to 20%. So, for complex procedures, it is very useful to see if you can get it done some place cheaper. First example of intracranial hemorrhage, price ranges from $9,540 - $234,913. Certainly gives a lot of input to make an appropriate decision. Very unlikely that without medicare negotiation, prices will magically converge to some middle point for all of them.
- refurb 13y agoThe issue is that if you have insurance, you're not paying the charge master rate or the Medicare rate, you're paying the negotiated (and likely non-public) rate for your insurer. The 20% co-insurance you pay is based on the negotiated rate.
- dougmccune 13y agoExactly. If this knew what my insurance company had negotiated for the procedure, and I could input my policy details to figure out what my personal cost would be then I can totally see the usefulness. But as a consumer I just have no idea at all what knowing the Medicare reimbursement prices tells me. If I assume that the relative differences that Medicare has negotiated are similar to the relative differences my insurance company has negotiated (which I'm guessing is an invalid assumption), and if I accurately know what my policy will cover vs not cover (again, a nearly impossible thing to know given how complicated these things are), then maybe you can make a decision with this data. But the system is so complicated that I don't think that works at all by just using this dataset.
- crazy1van 13y agoWho cares? My insurance co-pay is the same either way, which is exactly the problem. There is zero incentive to shop on price. Btw, nice work :)
- sbashyal 13y agoYes, in the short term. But in the long term, your insurance premiums are decided based on the cost of your health care. So if everyone spent wisely, the premiums would go down or stop rocketing the way they have been.
- neilsharma 13y agoTrue, but because you don't foot the bill aside from a relatively small co-pay, hospitals/insurance companies can get by charging more and more. This ruins it for the ~50M Americans who don't have insurance. We'll see how Obamacare deals with it though.
- MJR 13y agoYou have a PPO plan so you pay a copay. Many people have HSA, High Deductible or Catastrophic plans where they pay out of pocket until their hit their deductible. So all of these people have an incentive to shop on price. You're just choosing to pay more in premiums for the benefit of not having to worry about the costs for care. But this tool only includes Medicare data so it doesn't apply to any of those cases we just mentioned.
- sehugg 13y agoPretty cool. You could also fly to Costa Rica, if you have the time...
- toomuchtodo 13y agoCozumel/Playda Del Carmen has a significant medical tourism industry as well (dental included!). Half the price vs the US.
- hotloo 13y agoNice! Me and my friend Anders made a bit better version of this, at http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/#/ http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/#/ Check it out!
- maxerickson 13y agoMajor joint replacement is much cheaper than Major Joint Replacement.
- hotloo 13y agoYes, that was a bug. They actually correspond to two different slugs in our database. One that has higher price is pointed to the more complicated procedures that involved multiple complications, while the other one is simpler procedure without any complications.
- rexec 13y agoWe did a similar thing at BetterDoctor a few weeks ago: http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/ http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- neilsharma 13y agoCool! Did you get the data from: http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/rankings http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/rankings I'd love to talk more about how this can be taken to the next step. Can't find your contact info in your profile--mind pinging me at: neilsharma101 at gmail dot com
- hotloo 13y agoYep. We tried to compare the hospital quality with the prices.
- keeptrying 13y agoWhy don't you make it an app and give it to each doctor to give to patients?
- rexec 13y agoThat's an interesting idea.
- parbo 13y agoAs a European, the need for this baffles me.
- mehuln 13y agoExample of very useful and transparent system that should be available for everyone. Keep going in this direction...
- 727374 13y agoThis is great. Please sort the items in the drop down list. (I'm on Chrome)
- shill 13y agoYou really should warn users to find the NEAREST hospital when they are having chest pain--which is one of the procedure selections. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a doctor.
- markdown 13y agoThen they save your life. A week later, you receive the bill and the resulting heart attack kills you.
- msane 13y agoHeroic sir.
- rtfeldman 13y agoBrilliant! Great work.
- auctiontheory 13y agoExcellent POC - Obamacare needs to pick this up and run with it, to provide the next level of detail, for all insurers. Can you tell us about the technology under the hood? Ruby or Node (or whatever)? What APIs did you use? Programming-wise, what was easy and what turned out to be tricky?
- neilsharma 13y agoHey. The technology i used focused on speed of deployment. My DB and "backend" is all parse (I don't have a traditional backend). My hosting service is site44, which is simple dropbox hosting so i don't have to setup a server. The rest of it is just js/html/less files. I used bootstrap for the styling and jquery/google maps API for everything else. I did do some pre-processing on the data in python to geocode the locations (ie: change the street addresses to long/lat coordinates). I used geopy to do that, and pandas to manage the data. The total product took me three days to build and design
- benmathes 13y agoIncredibly useful if you're on medicare (what the price data is based on). For the majority of us _not_ on medicare, castlighthealth.com is solving this. It's B2B for now, i.e. Tesla pays for castlight and then its employees can use castlight to find out how much things will cost.
- MJR 13y agoThese are called cost and quality or transparency tools in the industry. Many insurance companies have tools that can do this exact thing for their members AND apply it to your specific plan at the time of the inquiry. So you can choose based on the procedure cost and your actual cost based on your deductible and co-insurance. Not only that, the tools will also tell you about quality so you can compare based on the quality of service, cost of service and your actual cost at the same time. Unless you can do all of these things at the same time with your tool, it leaves out critical factors for those actually searching for this type of information as it applies to them at any given time - most importantly when they are trying to make a decision. Additionally, you only have access to negotiated rates for Medicare whereas an insurance company providing this information is going to provide as much information as they can for all of their members by displaying their negotiated rates specific to your plan. As an HN reader, if you like this tool, go check with your insurance company and see what they already have and how specific it is for you.
- Splendor 13y agoAdditionally, you only have access to negotiated rates for Medicare whereas an insurance company providing this information is going to provide as much information as they can for all of their members by displaying their negotiated rates specific to your plan. This is important. Contracted network discounts may not align with Medicare reimbursement rates for providers so if you have insurance through a network you should look for a tool that can compare in-network rates for your plan as MJR suggests.
- bartcatz 13y agoI picked one (Heart Failure with Shock with MCC) at random http://www.cms.gov/icd10manual/fullcode_cms/P0136.html http://www.cms.gov/icd10manual/fullcode_cms/P0136.html the link shows all the diagnoses that fall in that category of DRGs. (DRGs are the packages of procedures that Medicare pays a fixed price for, simply put. If you get that diagnosis, you submit that DRG. However in this case the map from diagnosis to DRG is one to many.) Some of the average costs are only from 20-30 discharges. Do you think that makes for good math or some sort of price guide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group It may highlight that the DRG is incorrectly applied by some hospitals (maybe?), but it has nothing to do with 'going down the street' for a better 'price'. nice interface though.
- johnrob 13y agoEye opening... great work! Bug: (FF 16.0.1 on OSX 10.8.5) When the "select a procedure" drop down box is expanded, wheel scrolling up/down seems to also zoom the map underneath it.
- bartcatz 13y agoI picked one (Heart Failure with Shock with MCC) at random http://www.cms.gov/icd10manual/fullcode_cms/P0136.html http://www.cms.gov/icd10manual/fullcode_cms/P0136.html the link shows all the diagnoses that fall in that category of DRGs. (DRGs are the packages of procedures that Medicare pays a fixed price for, simply put. If you get that diagnosis, you submit that DRG. However in this case the map from diagnosis to DRG is one to many. And the reimbursement will vary by DRG.) Some of the average costs are only from 20-30 discharges. Do you think that makes for good math or some sort of price guide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group It may highlight that the DRG is incorrectly applied by some hospitals (maybe?), but it has nothing to do with 'going down the street' for a better 'price'. nice interface though.
- nickbauman 13y agoA couple of points: There are far fewer procedures / pathologies here than are out there. At least sort the procedures / pathologies lexicographically. It would be even better if I could NLS search by the procedure.
- Splendor 13y agoAnd if you want to get really fancy, let a user search in layman's terms too (e.g. "sore throat", "mammogram", "MRI", etc.).
- anothernaysayer 13y agoBe careful comparing costs alone. Like everything else, sometimes more expensive things are better in quality. This might manifest in a different diagnosis, a longer recovery time, complications, or no difference at all. Kind of like a bandit problem because you only get one opportunity to choose.
- usablebytes 13y agoExcellent problem choice and great work with the solution. http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/ http://pricemaps.betterdoctor.com/, too, have done a wonderful job with their version. May be this will also make a great phone app. If users can pre-configure a couple of medical procedures (faced in their medical history), the app can show price comparisons on the map by default at every launch. This might help addressing the concern https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864945.
- jeanlucneptune 13y agoAssuming this data is from the Medicare (insurance program for those >65) dataset released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services earlier this year (http://go.cms.gov/1bowKJA http://go.cms.gov/1bowKJA) I have a couple of points to make: 1.) Not sure if you grabbed "charges" or "payments", but "charges" are what the providers (hospitals) billed to Medicare, and "payments" are what Medicare actually paid the providers. "Payments" would be the best indicator of "price". 2.) Regardless of whether you are using "charges" or "payments", it's pretty much irrelevant for the average person. Why? Because the patient never pays the full amount (except for the uninsured...see below). 3.) While you don't pay the full amount in most cases, you will have to pay something. However, what you actually pay varies WIDELY based on your health insurer (the "payor") and the design of the health insurance plan. 4.) Also note that every "payor" negotiates a different price, so the Medicare price does not equal the Commercial Insurance price which does not equal the Medicaid price which does not equal the price the uninsured person pays. 5.) Finally, the diagnostic/procedural terminology in this dataset is impenetrable to most people. For example, does anyone on HN know what "transient ischemia" is? And if you do, do you understand that you can have transient ischemia in many parts of your body (FTR, I'm an MD)? Although I appreciate the effort and the clean visualization, I don't think this data is particularly useful to an individual trying to make health care decisions for reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (and probably others that I'm missing). The one place where this data may be useful on an individual level is in the case of the uninsured. When you have no insurance the hospital basically makes up a price (taken from something called the "chargemaster") that is way more than what commercial insurance would pay, and WAY WAY more than what Medicare would pay. Having access to this data might help an uninsured person negotiate a lower price when the hospital comes after you with a giant bill. Medicare is a pretty solid standard to compare to - i.e. "you're charging me 5X, whereas you would only charge Medicare X". On a societal level I think this data is also extremely valuable because now you can start to analyze pricing disparities across procedure types and geographies, which is really helpful. You can also put pressure on providers who are gouging individuals paying sticker price (i.e. the uninsured), which is important given that medical bills drive the majority of personal bankruptcies. We ran a competition on this topic recently at Health 2.0 and you can learn more about the issue and the datasets on our site. You can also view other visualizations of this very important data: http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/rwjf-hospital-price-transparency-challenge/ http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/rwjf-hospital-price-t... Transparency in health pricing is a very important topic and something you'll hear a lot more about in the future. Happy to discuss further with anyone who wants to learn more (@jeanlucneptune, jeanlucneptune@gmail.com).
- caycep 13y agoHowever, I think hand in hand with this you need to map outcomes data, especially for invasive procedures. Often, the reason to go to a "Big Hospital" say UCSF instead of Podunk Community Hospital is that there is often a big disparity in skill between a UCSF faculty surgeon vs. others. Or, even between different hospitals. I'm not sure how to do this - hospitals like to hide adverse outcomes from the public, but it's really information in the public interest. Ideally you'd want some sort of index that weighs complication rates (something unexpected happening), outcome/effect measures (procedure did what it was supposed to do), with price.
- johnpowell 13y agoHave you ever thought you were having a heart attack? Flu tends to be moved by car.
- joebeetee 13y agoPresume you're just updating, but I'm getting a JS error on line 21 query.ascending)(
- ye 13y agoYou have a JS error that breaks the whole site. Here it is: var query = new Parse.Query(Procedure); query.limit(1000); query.ascending)( <---- error query.find({
- neilsharma 13y agoThanks for the notice. The change has been fixed.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoThis is cute, but it is based on a flawed premise. There are not "prices" for medical procedures and even the providers don't know what they are going to charge. Anecdata: when my wife was pregnant I asked the hospital what are the basic charges for normal obstetric delivery, since we were paying out of pocket. I got a reply in writing that it was $20k, a suspiciously round number without itemization. The baby comes and there are no complications and no anesthetic and the attending physician never even showed up for some reason. So it was in every way the cheapest possible way to have a baby short of squatting over a blanket. Needless to say that this American hospital would not even have admitted us without a certified check in advance, so we had spotted them the $20k. Over the next six weeks I get literally dozens of bills. I get a bill from the attending obstetrician who wasn't even present. I get bills for anesthesia that wasn't administered. I get bills in total of over $31k. I was uninsured but I'm not some chump, so my attorney sent these people sternly worded letters and we held the line at $20k which I think anyone would agree is already a ridiculous price in the first place. Point is, nobody in this system has any idea what the price of anything is. There's no rate card. It's a collective emergent phenomenon that prints invoices. Nothing more.
- ulfw 13y agoWOW just wow. Would have been cheaper to fly first class to any other country in the world and get the baby there. It's really time for significant overhaul of the health care system here in the US
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoI don't know if I'm just completely retarded or hitting a bug. How do I use the "Select a Procedure..." box? Typing into it does nothing. If I click on the box (or the down triangle), it brings up a menu with only one option, which says "Select a Procedure..." and does nothing. This is on Chrome on Windows. I'm in Los Angeles, if that matters.
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoOh it might be this syntax error on line 21 of index.js: Is: query.ascending)( Presumably should be: query.ascending();
- neilsharma 13y agooh sorry, I must've introduce that error when fixing other things. Thanks for the notice.
- slr555 13y agoApp doesn't work on safari or firefox mac
- 31reasons 13y agoGreat idea, but why is this thing on front page if its not working ? I see nothing to select in "Select Procedure" menu.
- snklee 13y agoI am experiencing the same trouble here, no menu to select...
- neilsharma 13y agosorry, the problem has been fixed
- carolineld 13y agoCan't wait to try but right now, it looks like there's something wrong with the dropdown menu: Cannot select a procedure.
- Edmond 13y agoNYT article on this a few days ago...I thought exactly about an app like this...kudos.
- diasks2 13y agoVery cool idea. I think you should add something like select2[1] to your select input. That way when a user starts typing it could automatically start to autosuggest procedures. [1] http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/ http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/
- it200219 13y agoSuper cool. Good work.
- deathanatos 13y agoUncaught SecurityError: An attempt was made to break through the security policy of the user agent. (parse-1.2.13.min.js:1) (Hint: I block cookies.) Nothing but a sickly looking map, and no data.
- forgottenpaswrd 13y agoMedical prices are so outrageous in the US that, in theory, the medical business is a good field for startup disruption. Real disruption, not showing prices on a page but having actual good doctors at a good price. There is a monopoly today controlled by few.
- novalis78 13y agosnaphealth tries to do just that. hopefully they get more traction in 2014. Concierge doctors are all over the US as well, but its still hard to compare them or find a place that does that
- nej 13y agoThese procedures look a lot more frightening when they're written in all capital letters. If this is bothersome for you too, it's an easy fix in javascript. If it were any other element I would have said CSS, but text-transform:capitalize doesn't apply when applied to select tags. Here's how to do it in JS: http://pastebin.com/cnVJwds1 http://pastebin.com/cnVJwds1
- spintongue 13y agoIts a tourism short story about the city of munich. www.thescreechersworld.blogspot.com/2013/07/up-from-drought.html?m=1
- spintongue 13y agoIts a tourism short story about the city of munich. www.thescreechersworld.blogspot.com/2013/07/up-from-drought.html?m=1
- rschmitty 13y agoThis is a great start, however a key thing that is missing (at no fault of the authors) is patient outcomes. Just because a service is cheaper does not mean you should shop by the lowest bidder. BetterDoctor's Pricemaps also include US News Rank and score which gives you a place to start: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-hospitals/articles/2013/07/16/how-we-ranked-the-best-hospitals-2013-14-an-faq http://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-hospitals/articles... Please please please do not shop strictly by the lowest price when it comes to your family's health. Research both the hospital and the doctor who will be doing the procedure when it comes to complex procedures.
- davycro 13y agoHave you looked at the Dartmouth Atlas? They've been mapping healthcare costs for the last decade. Might have some good data and inspiration for you.
- neilsharma 13y agoThanks for the tip. I'll look into it :)
- joshdance 13y agoReally cool, but also not super helpful. Prices are not set. Book prices are not shared. Some prices are protected by crazy nearly anti-trust agreements (heart implants). And you have to know which procedure you want or should have for a particular condition. But, that being said, I think it is awesome. Anything we can do to fix healthcare needs to be done.
- eriktrautman 13y agoThe dropdown is difficult to parse, alphabetizing would help. Or at least group similar procedures together under a heading.
- thyrsus 13y agoI'm in the midst of a heart attack, and I'm supposed to optimize cost/benefit of the area hospitals according to available data on expenses and outcomes. I invite those in favour of market solutions to propose practical responses. If Siri gives me bad advice, is Apple liable? Was I not under duress when agreeing to the 50 page (or minute) disclaimer?
- ehosca 13y agoin this day and age of bigger monitors with larger and larger screen real estate, any and all "map overlay apps" need to be full-screenable...
- hydrologie 13y agoI made a similar app at http://healthcostnegotiator.com/ http://healthcostnegotiator.com/ I took the approach of targeting under/un-insured patients with the goal of assisting them in negotiating their health care costs to levels more similar to the Medicare payments. It is pretty difficult to shop for medical care in the event of an emergency, so my tool gives nearby, regional, and national prices for selected procedures so that the patient go into price negotiations with their care provider and hopefully get charged a lower price. Edit: I also made a visualization of the CMS Provider Charge Data here: http://labs.coseppi.com/cms/ http://labs.coseppi.com/cms/
- ianbicking 13y agoIt's unclear how accurate this is. I searched my area for a random item (something respiratory) and there was one hospital that was $10k and another that was $30k. The $30k hospital probably has inflated prices, but not by 3x – it's also the hospital that takes harder cases. It's the hospital other hospitals send patients to. When we looked at hospitals for the birth of our daughter we looked at C-section rates. Almost all hospitals were the same, there was one good hospital, and then there was this hospital which had twice the C-sections of any other. But it's the hospital that gets the hard cases, a friend later delivered there (I think by C-section) after barely avoiding premature labor from 20 weeks to 35 weeks. Because people go there when they have medical challenges they have a high C-section rate, and generally high rates for everything.
- vpsingh 13y agoExcellent design, Here are a few bugs logged for bestmedicareprice.com by 99tests http://app.99tests.com/openbugs/?company=best-medicare-price http://app.99tests.com/openbugs/?company=best-medicare-price