About This Project
This independent, open-source project ingests hospitals' machine-readable price files, normalizes their contents, and publishes the results together with the rules that limit cross-hospital comparisons.
About the project & author
This is an independent, open-source portfolio project by Jake Gussler. It demonstrates an end-to-end data workflow — ingesting CMS machine-readable price files, modeling them with dbt and DuckDB, and publishing a reporting layer that is honest about what the data can and cannot show — applied to a real, messy public-data problem. The site is not affiliated with any hospital, insurer, or government agency.
Why this exists
Federal rules require hospitals to publish their standard charges, but file formats and labels vary. This project compares only rows that meet the published methodology. Rows that do not qualify remain available with a specific reason.
Scope
- Corpus: Nashville metro — a defined hospital set, listed below. Results apply only to the included hospitals and should not be generalized to other markets.
- Sources: each hospital's own published standard-charges file, linked from its page.
- Cadence: data refreshes when the corpus is re-ingested and re-exported; the export date and build identifier appear on the overview and downloads pages.
Hospitals in the current corpus
Corrections
If you represent a hospital or insurer and believe a number is wrong, open an issue in the project repository with the page URL, the value in question, and, if possible, the corresponding row in the hospital's published file. We will check the source file, parsing, normalization rules, and presentation. Confirmed project errors will be corrected; source-file issues will be identified as such.
Current site features
The site includes a comparability funnel, hospital report cards, insurer profiles, methodology and glossary pages, and a download bundle with a data dictionary. Hospital-level data confidence and context-level comparison confidence are separate measures.
What's planned
- Keeping the Nashville hospital roster and source files current, then adding other metros.
- Loading more public-domain code descriptions (HCPCS and APC next).
- Price history once multiple file versions per hospital are retained.
- Better insurer-name matching coverage.
What this site will not do
Predict your bill, rank hospitals by quality, or assert legal compliance. Those require data and authority this project does not have — and saying so is part of the methodology.