The Team behind the idea.

MeCoMa: Smarter Healthcare Cost Management

Inspiration

Healthcare costs are rising year after year, yet patient outcomes don’t always improve. Hospitals face wasted resources, unnecessary procedures, long wait times, and frequent readmissions — all of which strain budgets and harm patients.

We were inspired to build a tool that helps leaders cut waste without cutting quality, turning scattered data into actionable insights.

What it does

MeCoMa (Medical Cost Management) is an AI-powered dashboard that unifies billing, outcomes, readmissions, provider performance, wait times, and patient satisfaction data into one centralized hub.

It allows:

Users to identify high-cost, low-value procedures.
Operations teams to spot inefficiencies like long patient wait times.
Clinicians to track readmission risks and patient satisfaction.
Executives to compare provider performance across specialties.

With AgentForce AI, leaders can also ask natural language questions — “Which procedures are the most wasteful?” — and instantly get results.

How we built it

We built MeCoMa using Salesforce and Tableau Next for data integration and interactive dashboards, with AgentForce AI for natural language queries.

Steps:

Created semantic models with calculated fields such as:

$$ HighWaste = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if Treatment\ Cost > 1000 \; \wedge \; Outcome < 70} \ 0 & \text{otherwise} \end{cases} $$

Designed multi-page dashboards for financial, operational, clinical, and provider insights.
Integrated AgentForce AI so leaders can query dashboards in plain English.
Focused on professional UX design, ensuring the dashboards feel app-like and easy to navigate.

Challenges we ran into

Combining multiple healthcare datasets into a single coherent model.
Designing dashboards that balance depth with simplicity for non-technical users.
Working within Tableau Next’s new interface, which lacks some classic features like size encoding on scatterplots.
Building and polishing everything under tight hackathon time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully functional multi-dashboard prototype in under 15 hours.
Added AI query support, showing how AgentForce can power natural language exploration.
Balanced financial, clinical, and patient experience metrics in one tool.
Created a design that feels both polished and ready to deploy.

What we learned

How to leverage Tableau Next to build multi-page dashboards with an app-like flow.
Techniques for combining financial, operational, and clinical data into one model.
The importance of building for non-technical decision makers as the end users.
How to simulate predictive modeling and demonstrate AI integration in a hackathon setting.

Result Analysis

Our prototype analysis demonstrated measurable impact:

Financial Impact: High-cost, low-outcome procedures (e.g., CT scans, knee surgeries) account for nearly $18\%$ of spend. Optimizing them could save up to $15\%$ annually:

$$ \text{Savings} \approx 0.15 \times \$30M = \$4.5M $$

Operational Efficiency: MRI procedures averaged 65 minutes wait time vs. 9 minutes for blood tests. Streamlining resources could reduce wait times by $40\%$, saving about \$1.2M annually.
Clinical Outcomes: Heart surgery readmission rates are $22\%$, costing about \$8,000 per patient. Improving protocols could cut readmissions by $25\%$:

$$ \text{Savings} \approx 0.25 \times \$8,000 = \$2,000 \text{ per patient} $$

Provider Accountability: Outcome gaps of 15 points between top and bottom quartile providers. Closing this gap could improve outcomes by $12\%$, saving \$900K annually.
AI Efficiency: AgentForce reduces dependency on analysts, saving about 520 hours of manual analysis annually.

What's next for MeCoMa

Add real-time hospital data feeds to move from prototype to live insights.
Build predictive models for readmission risk, moving from descriptive to prescriptive analytics.
Expand adoption to insurers and clinics beyond hospitals.
Develop MeCoMa into a standalone web application that becomes the decision-making assistant for healthcare executives.