[dhruvkar]

A comparison site for hospital prices.

These have to legally be made available by each hospital for all services they provide (since January 1, 2019).

At the moment they're hard to find, often buried on the hospital's website and not easy comparable to other hospitals in the area.

A kayak-like site for health procedures would be very useful.

[muzani]

Comparison site for anything is sorely missing. I needed a comparison site for babysitters, or one for medical insurance. We've got a unicorn which only does comparison for financial services.

So I'm thinking another idea is making a comparison or listing site generator. These sites are very light in terms of tech, heavy in research and operations work, so they're too hard for both the techies and the experts in a field.

[dhruvkar]

Agreed on comparison sites.

re: comparison site generator - I could see that being useful.

I've toyed around with using Google Sheets as the database and the statically regenerating the site every X minutes. Non-techies enter new info via Google forms or directly edit the spreadsheet.

All filter/search is done on the front-end.

[throwawaydotcom]

I have created a comparison site for budget android smartphones. URL - https://shop4moto.com

[pknerd]

but how one can earn from X comparison sites? Not everyone offers affiliates. Or, am I missing something about the business model?

[dhruvkar]

Question was about side projects with no stated incentive.

Business model is not clear at this stage.

[Jefro118]

I've looked into this very problem. Unfortunately, the chargemaster prices are not very representative of what any patient would actually pay. Instead, they are often used as a point to start negotiations with health insurance providers. They may apply to those without insurance but even then there is usually a negotiation of some kind and the listed prices don't apply. Each healthcare and insurance provider will have differences in their contracts so there's no real way to estimate what a person will pay given the chargemaster prices. Also, many chargemasters are impossible to decode. Some of them use medical codes that allow for cross-comparison, but many of them just have an arbitrary reference number and a price so you have no idea which procedure is which.

I think if you can collect information from patients about the final amount they paid for a given procedure (plus the reference codes) and then use that to find patterns in how those bills correspond to the chargemaster you might be able to create a more useful tool. This becomes much more difficult than just scraping though.

The Trump administration started the process on a bill to force insurance providers to make the details of their contracts transparent earlier this year. If that actually ends up getting done (maybe sometime next year), that would likely be a much more useful source of info to aggregate. Insurance providers will probably try and hide the info as many hospitals did, ready for scrapers to step in.