MediCosts

Live Demo

Healthcare price, payment, and quality transparency in one searchable platform.

MediCosts aggregates a dozen federally-mandated public datasets into one place: hospital costs and quality, 30M+ industry payments to physicians, Medicare Part D drug spend, the clinician registry, post-acute care, insurance networks, and community health. An AI assistant, “Abby,” answers natural-language questions across every dataset — turning scattered, opaque disclosures into answers anyone can use.

Live Demo GitHub

The Problem

The data is public — and unusable

US healthcare pricing remains deliberately opaque. A procedure can cost three times as much across town, yet patients have no way to compare. CMS, HRSA, and the CDC have published a mountain of hospital quality, cost, clinician, payment, and community-health data — but it's scattered across incompatible portals with no unified interface. Researchers spend months normalizing it; patients can't find a qualified, in-network clinician without conflicts of interest.

MediCosts unifies these datasets into one searchable platform, with natural-language AI on top — making transparency that's mandated by law actually usable.

Capabilities

A dozen datasets, one interface

Hospital cost & quality explorer

Search 4,000+ hospitals by name, location, or condition. View star ratings, HCAHPS, infection rates, readmission penalties, mortality, cost, and value-based purchasing scores — and compare hospitals side by side.

Top-50 DRGs + estimator

Identify the most expensive diagnosis-related groups nationally, then search hospitals by state or ZIP proximity to see median costs, quality, volume, and markup — sortable by price, distance, or value.

Open Payments transparency

Look up any physician by NPI to see pharmaceutical and device-company payments — by category, payer, and amount — across 30M+ Sunshine Act records, with national and state leaderboards.

Part D drug spend

Explore the most expensive drugs on Medicare, cost-per-prescription, brand-vs-generic deltas, and prescriber-level patterns — with multi-year trends revealing drug-cost inflation.

Hospital financials

HCRIS cost-report data exposes operating margins, cost-to-charge ratios, uncompensated care, and staffing — surfacing hospitals claiming hardship while running healthy margins.

Clinician directory

Search 2.7M providers by name, specialty, and state — with credentials, facility, telehealth availability, and linked industry payments in one profile.

Insurance network lookup

Check whether a hospital or clinician is in-network for major insurers, using machine-readable Transparency-in-Coverage files.

Shortage & community health

Map HRSA professional-shortage designations by ZIP, and overlay CDC PLACES community health (diabetes, obesity, uninsured rate) for context behind the outcomes.

Abby AI assistant

Ask in plain language — "the safest, cheapest hospital in Texas for heart surgery," or "doctors in San Francisco with no pharma payments." Abby orchestrates 60+ tools over live data and streams a cited answer.

Data Sources

Twelve federal datasets

Every source is a federally-mandated public disclosure. The value is in the aggregation and the access — not proprietary collection.

CMS Medicare Inpatient (IPPS) — DRG pricing across 4,000+ hospitals

CMS Hospital Quality — HAI, PSI, mortality, readmission, star ratings

CMS Open Payments — 30M+ industry payments (Sunshine Act)

HCRIS Cost Reports — hospital financials and margins

NPPES — 2.7M-provider national clinician registry

CMS Part D — drug spending and prescriber patterns

CMS Provider Compare — post-acute (SNF, home health, hospice, dialysis)

HRSA HPSA — health professional shortage areas

CDC PLACES — ZIP-level community health measures

CMS Value-Based Purchasing — domain and total performance scores

Insurance networks — in-network status from coverage files

Census ACS — ZIP demographics and coverage rates

Product Tour

Inside MediCosts

Real public CMS data, live in the application — click any view to enlarge.

MediCosts overview of hospital markups, penalties, and safety failures — **The truth about healthcare costs.** A landing analysis that frames the data — average markup over Medicare, penalized hospitals, and safety failures — with the worst price-gougers and readmission penalties surfaced immediately.

medicosts.acumenus.net/hospitals

Hospital profile. Drill into any of 5,400+ hospitals — DRG pricing, HCAHPS ratings, readmission and safety penalties, and the industry payments tied to it, on one profile.

MediCosts Open Payments industry-to-physician payments — **Open Payments.** 30M+ Sunshine Act payments from pharma and device makers to physicians, aggregated and searchable down to the individual provider.

MediCosts Medicare Part D drug spending — **Part D drug spending.** Five years of Medicare Part D spend across 14,000 drugs, with prescriber-level detail and year-over-year trend.

MediCosts geographic analysis choropleth map — **Geographic analysis.** Cost, quality, and access mapped to the county level — overlaying CMS spend with HRSA shortage areas and CDC community-health signals.

Architecture

How it works

React 19 + Vite

A single-page app with domain-organized pages, Zustand state, TanStack Query fetching, Recharts visualizations, and a dark clinical theme.

Express API

A REST API of 50+ endpoints grouped by domain — quality, DRGs, payments, drugs, financials, community health — over parameterized PostgreSQL queries.

PostgreSQL

A medicosts schema of 20+ tables (millions of rows) with 14 materialized views for pre-computed aggregations refreshed nightly.

Abby (Claude)

Claude Haiku orchestrates 60+ tools (each mapped to an API endpoint); Sonnet synthesizes — streamed token-by-token over server-sent events.

Auth & rate limiting

JWT auth with bcrypt, CORS allowlisting, Helmet headers, and per-IP rate limits (tighter on the AI endpoint).

Production

Served behind an Apache reverse proxy with Let's Encrypt TLS, run as a systemd service — one server hosting both the API and the static SPA.

Who It's For

Use cases

Patient & advocate

Estimate a procedure in a metro area, filter by star rating and patient experience, verify network status, and ask Abby for the cheapest high-quality option nearby.

Journalist

Find hospitals with the highest charge-to-payment ratios, cross-reference operating margins, and surface conflicts via Open Payments — a data-backed exposé in an afternoon.

Health-services researcher

Pull multi-year cost trends, overlay CDC community health and HRSA shortage data, and have Abby run a multi-tool correlation between readmissions and community diabetes prevalence.

Employer / benefits

Compare in-network hospital quality and cost across plans, and flag high-cost or high-readmission outliers ahead of plan negotiations.

Under the Hood

Tech stack

React 19ViteTypeScriptZustandTanStack QueryRechartsNode.jsExpressPostgreSQLMaterialized ViewsAnthropic ClaudeSSE StreamingJWTApacheCMS Open Data

FAQ

Common questions

Is this HIPAA-regulated data?

No. MediCosts displays only provider- and facility-level aggregated public data — no individual patient records. All of it is federally-mandated public disclosure, so HIPAA does not apply.

How current is the data?

Sources update on different federal schedules — hospital inpatient costs and quality annually, Open Payments per program year, the clinician registry monthly. Each source carries its own vintage.

Why is Abby built on Claude?

Claude offers production-grade reliability, multi-turn reasoning, and native tool calling — Haiku for fast tool orchestration, Sonnet for synthesis. The provider is configurable.

What's the difference between charges and what I'll pay?

Displayed charges are the hospital's list price; actual cost depends on your insurance and negotiated rates. MediCosts also shows Medicare average payments, which are far lower than list charges.