gov4git VS transparency-data

One aspect of the project involves designing and maintaining open source datasets that help inform existence, pricing, and practices of healthcare providers, insurers, and plans. Currently we expose this in flat files, just for accessibility for a broad audience, but a lot of the data is naturally relational in nature. You can check it out here: https://github.com/TPAFS/transparency-data

This is cool! In case this is useful for you, u/taeyoungwoo or u/wolfman2scary, I compiled a list of MRFs for all hospitals in compliance across PA that might allow you to extend the coverage of your tool: https://github.com/TPAFS/transparency-data

Yeah I think that is a great strategy. I agree though that figuring out exactly what codes pertain to the actual services you plan to get can be difficult in the hospital setting. Are you familiar with the CMS/HHS pricing transparency laws 1 2 that went into effect this year? They don't solve the problem you mentioned of knowing what codes you'll actually be billed for at the end of the day, but in principle they do allow you to avoid having to talk with hospitals (or insurers) to figure out what they bill (or pay). The rules require costs and negotiated rates to be published. The locations of the files can be hard to track down though, so mileage may vary. I have a tangentially related project to document where all of the hospital files live on the web (much easier than the insurer problem), in case you're interested: https://github.com/TPAFS/transparency-data

Transparency rules will help, but there's a lot of work that will need to be done to ensure the resulting data is accurately reported, accessible, and consumer friendly before usage of the data becomes the norm. If anyone is interested, I started a gtihub repository to try to supplement and audit reported transparency data: https://github.com/tpafs/transparency-data