About This Project

Yes. Starting January 1, 2021, the CMS Hospital Price Transparency final rule requires every hospital operating in the United States to publicly post a comprehensive machine-readable file containing all standard charges — including gross charges, discounted cash prices, and payer-specific negotiated rates. Hospitals that fail to comply face civil monetary penalties.

Under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency rules, hospitals must publish specific standard charges so patients can compare costs. The three key pricing categories are:

Hospitals must publish these charges in two formats: a consumer-friendly list of at least 300 “shoppable services” and a massive, comprehensive machine-readable file (MRF).

The current dataset covers Indiana hospitals. The underlying code is open source and the pipeline can be applied to any state — Indiana was chosen as a focused starting point. Expanding coverage to additional states is on the roadmap.

A single large hospital file can contain millions of rows. To keep the search fast and relevant, the index is limited to two curated subsets:

• CMS Shoppable Services — the 70 consumer-relevant procedures (lab tests, imaging, outpatient surgery, maternity care, ER visits) mandated by the CY 2020 Hospital Price Transparency final rule.
• High-cost codes — the top-tier most expensive CPT/HCPCS codes identified by scanning all Indiana hospital files, so high-impact procedures are never missing.

Together these two sets cover the procedures patients most need to compare while reducing dataset size by roughly 97%.

For inpatient stays, hospitals group procedures into DRG (Diagnosis Related Group) codes — MS-DRG (Medicare) and APR-DRG (All-Patient). For outpatient visits, procedures are grouped into APC (Ambulatory Payment Classification) codes. Procedures that share the same DRG or APC are clinically similar and typically performed together during the same visit or hospital admission. Clicking that button queries the database for other procedures in the same clinical group so you can estimate related costs, rather than just a single line item.

Medical billing codes like CPT and HCPCS are written for clinicians, not patients. Clicking “What is this procedure?” sends the code and its description to an AI language model, which returns a plain-English explanation of what the procedure involves, why it is performed, and what to expect — helping you understand your options before asking your provider.

Yes — the full source code is available on GitHub . Hospital charge files are sourced from hospitalpricingfiles.org, which aggregates the machine-readable files published by each hospital. The raw CSVs are processed, filtered, and indexed into a SQLite database with FTS5 (Full-Text Search) to power this search. Prices shown are the hospitals’ own published standard charges and may differ from what you are ultimately billed.

This site is a free, non-commercial public resource. Keeping it running has real costs — cloud hosting, serverless database infrastructure, and bandwidth to serve thousands of searches. If you find it useful, please consider donating via PayPal or sponsoring on GitHub:

Every contribution directly offsets hosting expenses and helps keep the data updated and the search fast. There is no advertising, no paywall, and no data selling — sponsorships are the only way to sustain the project.