MediBill

Get the information you need to understand and negotiate your medical expenses

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Inspiration

Many people are over-billed for medical expenses. Additionally, a lot of people don't know that they can negotiate their treatment costs, or get a cheaper price when paying with cash. Recent laws passed in the US require transparency of treatment costs and we wanted to leverage this data. We wanted to make an easy tool for patients to digest their medical bills for negotiation and information about the services they received.

What it does

Our application is designed to provide patients with an easy way to digest information on their medical bill and compare the prices of each procedure to the average, giving them the opportunity to negotiate. If the user sees a procedure that wasn't preformed, they now have the information to dispute the charge.

  • The user uploads a medical bill to our site.
  • Our site will parse the document and read in the listed CPT codes listed on the Bill.
  • Our site will translate the CPT codes into language that is easier to digest for the user.
  • The site will also display average prices for the same procedure at hospitals in the area.

How we built it

We used Vue.js on the front-end and Google Cloud Functions to create callable endpoints to process the PDF data and return relevant information. We used public data from government websites such as the center for medicaid and medicare services and the California Department of Health Care Access and Information.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial goal was to use the zip code of the user in order to display relevant pricing information for the region they are located in. We quickly found out that finding a reliable dataset was very very difficult. Through several recently passed healthcare acts, hospitals are required to publicly list online the cost of the procedures they operate along with any relevant CPT codes. Even though this may be the case, we found that these rules are not strictly enforced and finding getting data from local hospitals was not easy. Instead we were able to find a dataset of national averages for certain CPT procedures.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite running into a lot of challenges, we're proud of our perseverance and sticking with technologies we weren't previously familiar with.

What we learned

  • How to use Google Cloud Functions to run "serverless code"
  • Deeper dive into REST APIs
  • Healthcare standards and laws surrounding publicly available information

What's next for Health Hacker

We want to find more reliable data and implement region specific procedure costs into our site.

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