Ask HN: Side Project Ideas?

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.

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.

have you invented a piece of paper and pen placed in the kitchen? :)

ya goal???