The world’s leading publication for data science, AI, and ML professionals.

Surveying Healthcare Spending Data

A short Survey of Healthcare Cost Data

Photo by RF._.studio on Pexels
Photo by RF._.studio on Pexels

Healthcare spending in the US continues to rapidly grow as the aging population and disease prevalence increase. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that healthcare spending in the US rose by almost $1 trillion between 1996 and 2015.

Health cost and quality are often made opaque to consumers due to lack of healthcare transparency. If consumers had access to quality healthcare information they may be able to have more agency in their healthcare services. For example, another study published in the American Heart Journal found that, after adjusting for patient risk and length of stay, 42% of the variability in cost of a coronary bypass surgery in New York State was explained by the hospital where the procedure was done. The hospital accounted for variability in cost more than length of stay and patient risk. If patients have access to this information, they could potentially save thousand in healthcare spending by exploring healthcare service providers.

A step towards healthcare spending transparency would be to make high quality healthcare Data available to the public. In this post, we will briefly survey some available public data sources containing healthcare cost information. You can explore Avicenna here.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

OECD is an international organization that reports on health spending and pharmaceutical spending around the world. Here, you can find charts reporting total Healthcare spending per capita by year and country. You can view the data in chart or table form. You can even download the data as a .csv for further analysis.

Qualified Health Plan (QHP) Data

Healthcare.gov provides public access to QHP landscape data. The datasets include individual and family health plans available in states where the federal government is operating the marketplace. The data includes information like issuer name, county name, plan marketing name, medical maximum out of pocket cost, medical deductible, primary care physician, emergency room, and specialist. If you’re interested in exploring the data in Python check out Analyzing Health Insurance Market Data. The data is available here.

Avicenna Health Technology

Avicenna is a free platform for users to search and compare prices for healthcare services. At the moment, the site is populated by anonymous posts from users who report on healthcare spending for services such as normal deliveries, c-sections, wellness exams, and more.

For each post the service name, cost, Insurance and hospital is displayed. If you click into a post you can see more specific demographic information such as age, gender, weight, and height.

This information can be very valuable to the consumer. Consider the study that found 42% of the variability in cost of a coronary bypass surgery was explained by the hospital where the procedure was done. If patients in LA who need a coronary bypass surgery can search for all of the hospitals where they are covered and select the cheapest option, this can dramatically aid the reduction in healthcare spending in the US while supporting a competitive healthcare market. At the moment Avicenna does not have many users but as the user base grows the data base for healthcare spending information will continue to grow. The platform allows users to anonymously sign up for free and begin posting and searching healthcare spending information.

Avicenna Health technology’s mission is to collect highly descriptive data for service costs, deliver price estimates for services and explain healthcare price variability. This can aid users in selecting the best healthcare service for their dollar. Specifically, it can increase competition in the healthcare market, leading to better service for the patient and improvement in healthcare outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS

To summarize, in this post we discuss 3 public data sources for accessing healthcare spending data. First we discussed the OECD total spending per capita data. This contains country specific healthcare spending data indexed by additional descriptors such as government and compulsory health insurance. This gives high level insights into which countries spend the most and which spend the least on healthcare services.

Next we discussed the QHP landscape data available on healthcare.gov which a provides good deal of useful information such as out of pocket costs at the county level. Analyzing county level out of pocket costs can be very useful for patients looking to explore different financial options for healthcare.

While sources like OECD and QHP are useful, the level of detail is limited. These sources do not provide important demographic information that may have a significant impact on costs such as gender, age and weight. For example, a high risk patient like an overweight senior citizen may have higher out of pocket costs for a coronary bypass than a young overweight person.

The Avicenna Healthcare Technology platform aims to make highly specific and high quality healthcare spending data available to the public. This public and anonymous platform allows users to safely share and search for healthcare spending information which can promote a healthy competitive market place for healthcare services. I hope you found this post interesting. Thank you for reading!


Related Articles