Using visualization and analysis with efficient dimension Reduction to determine underlying factors in hospital inpatient procedure costs

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has made public a data set showing what hospitals charged and what Medicare paid for the one hundred most common inpatient stays. Here we present the application of Reduced Basis Decomposition (RBD), an efficient novel dimension reduction algorithm for data processing, to the CMS data. This was paired with a comparative visual exploration of the results when put into context with characteristics of the hospitals and marketplaces in which they operate. We used Weave Analyst, a new web-based analysis and visualization environment, to visualize the relationship between the hospital groups, their charge levels, and distinguishing indicator variables. Particular insights to the relatively small number of underlying factors that exert greatest influence on hospital pricing surfaced thanks to the combined synergetic integration of the modeling, reduction, and visualization techniques.