Metro21 Intern Presents Fall Capstone Project

Metro21 intern and Heinz College MSPPM student Mary Kubinski presented her final capstone project alongside other Heinz college students for their client, Pittsburgh Business Group on Health (PBGH), a nonprofit that aims to help employers in the Pittsburgh region provide affordable and quality healthcare to their employees.

The three primary goals of the "Hospital Transparency Rule Implementation Analysis: Compliance and Price Variation" Capstone Team were to 

• Evaluate the compliance of general acute care hospitals in Southwestern Pennsylvania with the new CMS price transparency rule;
• Assess price variation across procedures, hospitals, and payers in the region;
• Develop an employer-oriented tool for visualizing and comparing prices in the region.

To provide a resource for self-insured employers to evaluate their negotiated rates in the regional market, the team collected and utilized price data with Microsoft Power BI software to develop a user-friendly dashboard tool.  The prototype tool is flexible, allowing users to select their hospitals and/or procedures of interest, and offers user interaction with price variation findings at various levels of aggregation.  The dashboard tool prototype can be expanded and built upon in future work organized by PBGH.