Level 1 Beginner

See what other people paid, and what happened

This note sketches a data product for people who need treatment and want to pay less for it. Chronic-condition communities already do a version of the work in public. Someone describes a diagnosis, and other people answer with what they tried, what it cost, and how it turned out. The idea is to make that exchange a dataset instead of a thread.

The loop is three steps. A person uses HIPAA to get their own medical records, uploads those records to a database, and then can read the other records in the pool. The fields that matter are the ones a patient can label: the outcome they actually had, and the cost. A chart without those two labels does not answer the question the product is for.

It is for patients with a chronic condition who already compare notes, and for anyone sketching a health-cost product in that shape. There is no app here, no schema, and no privacy review. On the SamWiki ladder this is Level 1 · Beginner: a first look you can read in a few minutes.

Two pointers were already attached to the idea. CSL Behring wrote about crowdsourcing and medical mysteries. Best Doctors sits next to the same question, still open on this page: what do they do with your data?

The idea, as written

Help people with chronic conditions see what others do. The product is a data-driven version of what Reddit’s chronic-condition communities already do.

  1. A person uses HIPAA to get their own medical records.
  2. They upload those records to a database.
  3. They gain access to the other records: medical outcomes labeled by users, and cost.

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A correction, a source, or the next idea belongs in a pull request on this repository.

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