In the meantime, since we have the data, this could be a good project for volunteers to glue together all the different documents from the different hospitals into a single system.
These files are provided as excel documents in what I assume to be a (hopefully) mostly unchanging location on each site. A script could download all the files, match up the procedures and then push it to a pretty tool for everybody to use when comparing prices.
Most enterprises have terrible dev/IT talent but when it is a cause as important as this, talented people tend to show up to provide a great solution.
I was thinking of doing this. I even started a bit, but I didn't end up getting very far. I'm torn between trying to run it as a service and running ads or whatever, or trying to run it as a wiki with contributors writing ETLs for individual hospitals and trying to tame the data set.
These files are provided as excel documents in what I assume to be a (hopefully) mostly unchanging location on each site. A script could download all the files, match up the procedures and then push it to a pretty tool for everybody to use when comparing prices.
Most enterprises have terrible dev/IT talent but when it is a cause as important as this, talented people tend to show up to provide a great solution.