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Volunteer to reduce the cost of health care ​

We are actively recruiting volunteers to help with Payless Health who have experience with health care, writing & communication, python, web development, and data science, and who are interested in making an impact with their skills.

If you are interested in making an impact with your data science skills, please reach out to us at hello@payless.health with your CV and a few sentences about what experience you have with health care, writing, python and web development.

What we need help with ​

  • We need help writing blog posts for this website analyzing the hospital prices in your area.
  • We need help making visualizations and building dashboards for hospitals in your area of the United States. Here is an example: https://payless.health/hospital/mount-sinai. We have collected the hospital price sheets from 4,000+ hospitals here so far, and we need help building dashboards for each hospital -- feel free to choose one in your city!
  • This can involve writing python code, such as this Jupyter notebook which shows how the price data was retrieved from the hospita's website and processed for the visualization.
  • This can also involve writing frontend code to visualize the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of prices at every hospital. (Code here for the demo page.)
  • We also need help with data engineering using dbt (data build tool) to help process the data and make it available for the dashboards. (Code here with an example from our training that shows how to visualize over 100 million datapoints on your laptop!)

Throughout, we use large language models such as ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, and have trained hundreds of students from a variety of backgrounds in state of the art practices in software engineering, analytics, and data science using this approach. The datasets we use are in the hundreds of gigabytes to petabytes of data, so this can accelerate your career and build your portfolio alongside having an impact. Contributors of ours frequently give talks at national and international conferences about our work, and collaborations can result in peer-reviewed publications if this may be of interest.

We have worked with high school students, college students, graduate students, and faculty from a variety of backgrounds, some with more programming experience, and others with less.

How this is having an impact ​

We are working with policymakers and journalists to help them understand the price of healthcare in the United States. We are also working with employers to help them understand how to improve health outcomes and reduce cost for their member populations using our open source code and data.

More background is in the talks we have given in the past year about this work:

We have also run an advertising campaign in NYC using this data; here is an example ad on the LinkNYC booth system near Times Square and Penn Station: https://www.onefact.org/images/five-boro-bike-tour/payless.health-linknyc-campaign.jpg

Here is a screenshot of the example dashboard of hospital prices for a large hospital in NYC with $2bn in revenue -- this shows 106,000+ prices (https://payless.health/hospital/mount-sinai).

We have also run an advertising campaign in NYC using this data; here is an example ad on the LinkNYC booth system near Times Square and Penn Station:

LinkNYC ad

Payless Health is sponsored by the Brown Institute at Columbia and Stanford (https://brown.columbia.edu/22-23-magic/) and Patient Rights Advocate (https://www.patientrightsadvocate.org/).

Released under the Apache 2.0 License and Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Copyright © 2023-Present One Fact Foundation.