New government data on hospital pricing – somebody please make an app!

Today the government released a bunch of data about how much hospitals charge for various procedures – there’s good coverage by the New York Times and by the Huffington Post. It seems like a big step for health care pricing transparency. (see the health care pricing articles from February)

But of course, the data itself is in a giant Excel/CSV file, and it’s hard to know what to make of it. This would make a great app! Somebody please make a good app out of this – the tricky part will be aggregating the data and giving each hospital a “cost score”, but after that you can just the hospitals on a map with their score.

Somebody do this!