The Mansueto Institute's Healthcare project explores price transparency across hospitals and procedures. It compiles a master file of negotiated and listed prices to help understand how the cost of care varies across providers, payers, and procedures.

To build the dataset, we gathered the machine-readable price transparency files that hospitals are required to publish for all hospitals in the Chicagoland area, through a mix of the individual hospital websites and the Hospital Price Files Finder on hospitalpricingfiles.org. We then parsed and standardized those files into a single harmonized schema, with a set of standardized price fields (negotiated rates, negotiated percentages, cash prices etc.) with a final estimated price that combines the available data. We also standardise the names of insurance providers, and the available codes (HCPCS, CPT, MS-DRG, APR-DRG, etc.) to allow comparison across hospitals. We finally arrive at a master file with a single row for each hospital-procedure-payer combination.

A sample of our work, looking at CPT 72148 (MRI, lumbar spine) is available here (download the sample). To request the full dataset, email miurbandata@uchicago.edu.

Meet the team behind the project on the People page.