Optimal Hospital

For the last few months I have been working on my submission to the Visualizing Hospital Price Data competition. This competition is being sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Health 2.0. The purpose of the competition is to help increase price transparency for some of the most common hospital stay types using newly released data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

My entry focuses on allowing users to compare hospitals within the city they live in. But my analysis leverages a variety of data from CMS (data link here) including information about hospital service, conditions, quality of care, and communication. I broke these metrics out into 5 key categories that users can weight the importance of. Then I produce an aggregated hospital score by summing these weighted factors for each hospital. 

Users can make comparisons across a selected city or view a particular hospital's data. Finally, a user can then explore which hospital provides the best price for each procedure.

Check out my entry here: www.myoptimalhospital.com

This was my entry to the first phase of the contest. I still have some more work to do including some design improvements, additional views, and some more advanced analysis including the following:

• Cluster analysis of the hospitals to find if there are different hospital types (e.g. specialty hospitals, general hospitals, etc)
• Regression analysis to determine which community factors (ex: income, employment, racial composition, etc) have the most significant impact on hospital conditions including cost, quality of care, and conditions
• Peer analysis to recommend a different hospital if you like one but they don't perform the procedure you are looking for

Let me know what think of the site so far. Thanks.

- Adam