Data Visualization for Medical Price Education and Transparency

The health care system in the United States is changing rapidly. Individual patients are expected to become educated medical consumers making informed choices and paying for those choices. Many researchers and designers are studying how medical consumers understand their medical care, but there is an opportunity for meaningful design strategies using data visualization to help consumers understand how much they pay for their care. This thesis uses service and user-centered design methods and interactive data visualization to create systems that gather medical prices and display them back to users all with the goal of creating more educated medical consumers.