Hospital prices in the US

Main map Hospital summary Hospital details Inpatient data Outpatient data

Download for Windows Phone

About: In May 2013 the US government released a bunch of data on how much hospitals charge for various procedures - see my comments here. This is the first time we've had such extensive data on hospital prices, and hopefully more transparency will lead to more reasonable prices.

The data was released in Excel/CSV format, and I've done some work to put it in an SQLite database to make it easier to use. I also pulled in data from Medicare's Total Performance Scores.

Download hospital prices SQLite database

Please - write some good apps with this data and tell me about it!

Database info: Here are the tables in the database:

Covered charges vs. total payments: I am not a health care pricing expert, but from the media coverage it sounds like "covered charges" is what the hospital bills you if you don't have insurance, and "total payments" is what Medicare pays. Most stories have focused on "covered charges".

Using SQLite on Windows Phone: I followed this handy guide and was up and running in no time!

How I made the database: I wrote a few Python scripts. generateSqlite.py generates the database and calculates the average prices and price indices. It also generates a file that I passed to bingmapsportal.com for geocoding (by using doGeocode.py). I manually saved the results to a file, then ran generateSqlite.py again to pull in the latitude/longitude.


Greg's Windows Phone apps