About
cleartau is an independent project that surfaces US hospital price-transparency data — cash prices, negotiated rates, and Medicare benchmarks — for the roughly 4,250 US hospitals required to publish them under CMS rule 45 CFR Part 180.
Who built this
Sean Bangalore
Founder
Machine learning engineer with 8 years of experience. Built cleartau as an independent project to make CMS hospital price transparency data searchable.
Methodology
- Source
- Machine-readable price-transparency files published by hospitals under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule.
- Refresh cadence
- Daily ingestion run. Per-hospital freshness still depends on each hospital’s own publication schedule.
- Quality controls
- See data quality for coverage, outlier detection, and pipeline freshness timestamps.
- CMS regulatory basis
- 45 CFR Part 180
Disclosures
- Funding: Independent and self-funded personal project. No payer, hospital, insurer, or vendor relationships.
- Scope: Reference data only — not medical advice, not an insurance estimate, not a guarantee of price. Your actual cost depends on your insurance, the hospital’s billing decisions at time of service, and clinical specifics that price files cannot capture.
- Data accuracy: CMS price-transparency files are published by hospitals themselves; cleartau surfaces what hospitals report. We flag obvious data-entry artifacts on the data quality page, but we do not modify reported prices.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or data partnerships: sbangalore@utexas.edu.