Project Title: Breaking Down Our Broken Healthcare System: The Effect of Coding Defects on Healthcare Prices and Customer Satisfaction
BASIS Advisor: Brown
Internship Location: UC Berkeley, School of Public Health
Onsite Mentor: Dr. Timothy Brown
Healthcare is becoming increasingly expensive for patients to afford, despite a consistent use of healthcare products. The rise in prices not only decreases a patient’s access to necessary healthcare, like diagnostics, but it also makes evident a form of corruption in private insurance companies. However, while the rise in healthcare prices are rampant and apparent, the mechanism is not yet clear as to exactly how insurance companies increase the prices that patients have to pay out-of-pocket. For these reasons, I have decided to study the relationship between current insurance policies in the Bay Area and the access to diagnostic tools by at-risk patients. This field of research is rich for exploration and will hold a wealth of information about how insurance and healthcare companies treat the community in the Bay Area. Are coding defects a mechanism to the rise of healthcare prices in the Bay Area? What is the correlation between the number of coding defects and customer debt or satisfaction? Focusing on the specific perspective of healthcare providers, I hope to construct a clear narrative that discusses this complex relationship.
My Posts
Week 10 – The Final Check-Up
Apr 24, 2019
Hello Everyone! This week, I am submitting my AP Research study for CollegeBoard review, and I’ll receive my results in May. For my concluding statement, I will go over my conclusion and possible policy recommendations. In this project, I investigated the practices of healthcare corporations that denied patients life-saving diagnostics. Because insurance companies are incentivized […]
Week 9 – Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Apr 17, 2019
Hello Again! This week, I had my AP Research Presentation to the faculty, so, in preparation, I’ll discuss a few econometric graphs that I utilized to explain the rising problem of healthcare prices in the Bay Area. In a study by Dr. Michael Dickstein at UC Berkeley, healthcare prices and charges were found to be […]
Week 8 – More Bang for Your Buck
Apr 11, 2019
Bonjour! This week, I’ll discuss the quantification analysis that I received from my two week internship at the Emergency Medical Center. Over the period of two weeks, I collected the billing data. I found that, on average, 1 medical billing error could force a patient to pay a higher cost of care by 103$. Correlation […]
Week 7 – The Customer Is Always Right
Apr 04, 2019
Hello! This week, I wanted to discuss my remaining results by starting with a story of how a broken nose led me to a medical internship at an emergency health center for two weeks. In November, I was playing an innocent game of basketball with some friends from Fremont High when I was hit really […]
Week 6 -… Get out of the kitchen
Mar 27, 2019
Hello! As the titles of my last two blogs suggest, I’ll reveal how my ambitions finally got the best of me as I attempted to survey over 7000 medical offices in a period of four weeks. After the success of my pilot study and the promise of revealing results, I was incredibly motivated to collect […]
Week 5 – If you can’t stand the heat…
Mar 24, 2019
Hello Again! This week’s blog will reveal my successful pilot study results after my transition from physicians to medical billers. Then, I’ll provide a brief overview of my developed methodology for the interview phase. As discussed last week, I began my project with the incorrect assumption that physicians handled their relationship with medical billers. From […]
Week 4 – Barking up the Wrong Tree
Mar 24, 2019
Hello Everyone! Welcome to my blog. In this week’s blog, I’ll reveal an unfounded assumption that almost left my research project awry, had one physician not told me another data source for exploration. After I finished the plan for my methodology last week, I immediately began to conduct a pilot study where I could get […]
Week 3 – Methodology
Mar 20, 2019
My methodology investigates the multi-faceted relationships in the diagnostic healthcare industry, specifically analyzing the three major players of the insurance providers, doctors, and patients. Although there are many dimensions to these three players, I will be employing the following methods to explore the role of insurance companies in a doctor’s decision to administer diagnostic tests […]
Week 2 – Background
Mar 20, 2019
Since 2010, the Northern California region has faced a healthcare crisis that has left Bay Area residents without crucial patient care. In his article “Consolidation Trends In California’s Health Care System,” Dr. Richard Scheffler detailed the rapid consolidation of the Bay Area healthcare markets by conducting an analysis into the level of horizontal concentration and […]
Week 1 – Introduction
Mar 20, 2019
Healthcare is increasingly becoming expensive for patients to afford. Despite a consistent use of healthcare products, the amount that patients have to pay for products have risen. Over the period of 2014 to 2018, Gary Claxton et al. of the Kaiser Family Foundation found that “inpatient prices for patients with private insurance rose about 13 […]