The data used for the Value Calculator is a combination of the 2023 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule and Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule. Data was imported into R (v4.2.1), where it was deduplicated and cleaned for easier use within the application. We chose to use Medicare data as it is standardized year over year and allows us to see differences in prices across the country. We are beginning to work on developing processing methods for hospital-specific data that are being released in accordance with the Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule.

An initial version of the calculator has been built in R Shiny as a proof of concept. Within this version, the user can explore Medicare costs for various tests and treatments. We will soon be transitioning the full dataset to the Value Calculator feature available on the site.