Techy Surgeon Policy Radar

By Techy Surgeon

Overview

Explore healthcare prices and public data with ten read-only tools from Techy Surgeon. Price Atlas helps you discover supported procedures, choose an exact code and hospital care setting, and compare posted commercial facility rates in a US city, state, supported market or hospital. It reports source dates, catalog coverage and the range, median, spread and histogram across all matching catalog hospital commercial medians before pagination. Price sorting covers that catalog subset, not every hospital or the lowest personal cost. The public preview returns up to five hospital rows. Linking an existing Techy Surgeon account lets the service check its permissions for larger Price Atlas pages and pagination. Without expanded permissions, the five-hospital public preview remains available. The other nine tools remain public. An integrated market brief compares one or two metros or states using ASC facilities, recorded operating rooms, historical growth, attributed operators, orthopaedic workforce and TEAM hospital context. Missing data, source periods and geographic limits remain visible. Explore CMS Open Payments general-payment aggregates for 2019–2025 by specialty and year. State, company and payment-category breakdowns are limited to Orthopaedic Surgery; company coverage is the published top-25 orthopedic-company extract. State, company and category filters cannot be combined. Payments do not establish misconduct, influence or clinical quality. Identify hospitals, check public CMS model status, understand TEAM, CJR-X, ACCESS and BALANCE, and find federal rules open for comment. CJR-X hospital assessments are rule-derived potential eligibility, not confirmed participation or an official participant list. Supporting identity, model-explanation and procedure-discovery lookups return evidence without extra cards. No cash/self-pay prices, insurer-specific prices, ZIP/radius search, personal insurance quotes, ASC procedure prices, private CJR-X financial exposure, individual clinician payment lookup, research payments, ownership interests, coding/RVU search or patient records. Built by Techy Surgeon. Explore more at https://techysurgeon.com/.

Tools

open_payments_search

ChatGPT

Use this when the user researches CMS Open Payments general-payment totals, trends or comparisons for 2019–2025. Return one initial result card for the requested aggregate view. Each group in the card already has an annual-trend control: a request to make annual trends available does not require a second call. Do not prefetch a separate trend or broaden the requested cohort; issue another result-producing call only when the user explicitly requests results of an additional distinct comparison. Supports all-specialty or named-specialty totals and annual trends. State, company and payment-category breakdowns require explicit specialty Orthopaedic Surgery; companies cover only the published top-25 orthopedic company extract. Use returned options and supported combinations. State/company/nature filters cannot be combined, and unsupported filters are never silently dropped. Returns USD amounts, available counts, source links and coverage limits. Payments do not establish misconduct, influence, clinical quality or personal relationships. Do not use for individual clinician/NPI lookup, research payments, ownership interests, hospital prices, patient billing, or unavailable years.

policy_asc_market

ChatGPT

Use this when the user researches ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), surgery center ownership or local outpatient competition through facility and operator counts. For a US city, metro area (CBSA) or state, returns named ASCs, operators and health-system affiliations where identified, available openings and closures, and source dates. Optionally filter by operator. For market comparisons or integrated capacity, growth and workforce context, prefer one policy_market_analysis call. Do not use for ASC procedure prices, financial performance, competition scores, hospital outpatient departments or individual surgeons. Use price_search for hospital prices.

policy_find_hospital

ChatGPT

Use this when the user needs to identify a US hospital in public healthcare data, look up its CMS Certification Number (CCN), or resolve a hospital name before checking CMS payment-model participation. Searches CMS Hospital General Information by hospital name, city or CCN. Returns hospital identity, location and source details; use policy_model_participation next for model status. Do not use for individual physicians, clinics or ambulatory surgery centers.

policy_market_analysis

ChatGPT

Use this when the user wants a deeper surgery-market briefing or wants to compare two US metros or states: ASC inventory and recorded operating rooms, historical growth, openings and closures, operator attribution, orthopaedic workforce and TEAM hospital context. One call combines the public evidence into one interactive result. Provide one or two places, CBSAs or states. Prefer this to separate ASC and workforce cards for a market comparison. Source periods, county coverage, missingness and incompatible comparisons remain explicit. Counts do not measure demand, utilization, profitability or financial risk; no private CJR-X data or protected market scores are returned.

policy_model_explainer

ChatGPT

Use this when the user asks about Medicare payment policy or value-based care involving TEAM, CJR-X, ACCESS or BALANCE: bundled-payment episodes, payment mechanics, quality requirements, eligibility or key dates. Returns cited evidence without opening a separate card. Use policy_model_participation for a named hospital's status. This tool explains target-price methodology but does not return hospital-specific episode targets, episode spending or exposure rankings. State that limitation when asked; Price Atlas commercial facility rates cannot fill those gaps. Do not use for medical coding, RVU valuation, patient-specific billing advice or policies outside these four models.

policy_model_participation

ChatGPT

Use this when the user asks which hospitals are in TEAM or may be eligible for CJR-X, whether a named hospital participates in a CMS payment model, or how model participation varies across a US market. Covers TEAM, CJR-X, ACCESS and BALANCE using public participation records and eligibility notes. Provide a hospital CCN from policy_find_hospital, or a place, CBSA or state. An explicit CJR-X area query returns hospital-level rule-derived assessments, including exclusions; reuse those rows instead of repeating the same hospitals' CCN lookups unless a new question requires them. CJR-X mandatory status means potentially eligible under the rules, not confirmed participation: IPPS/OPPS payment status and baseline volume are not verified. Preserve that qualification. Returns statuses, dates and sources. Do not use for financial exposure estimates, risk rankings or private payer contracts; use policy_model_explainer for how a model works.

policy_open_rules

ChatGPT

Use this when the user tracks federal health policy and asks which CMS, FDA or HHS proposed rules, requests for information or notices are open for comment, or when comments are due. Search Federal Register titles and abstracts by topic, such as Medicare physician payment, ASC policy, orthopaedics or AI, with an optional agency filter. Returns dockets, deadlines and source links from a daily-refreshed feed. Do not use for state legislation, a general policy news roundup, drafting a comment letter or explaining a final rule.

policy_ortho_workforce

ChatGPT

Use this when the user wants public healthcare workforce data about orthopedic or orthopaedic surgeon supply in a US county, state or nationwide: surgeon counts, surgeons per 100,000 residents, counties with no orthopaedic surgeon or distance to the nearest county with one. Returns aggregate CMS Doctors and Clinicians data with sources and method notes. Do not use for all-specialty workforce counts, individual surgeon recommendations, appointment availability or clinical quality rankings.

price_procedure_search

ChatGPT

Use this when the user wants to know which procedures or services have hospital price data, browse available procedures by specialty or state, or find the supported code and care setting before comparing hospital rates. Returns source-linked catalog entries and coverage counts without opening a separate card. Family/state counts combine codes and care settings; code counts cover the full catalog, not the selected state. Use price_search next for exact-code, setting and location price comparisons. This is not medical coding advice, a personal cost estimate, an ASC price catalog or CJR-X episode financial data.

price_search

ChatGPT

Use this when the user wants posted hospital facility prices: what hospitals report for a procedure in a US region, how those rates compare across hospitals, or a histogram of procedure prices. Supports procedures such as knee or hip replacement, cataract surgery and colonoscopy; use price_procedure_search to discover supported procedures and codes. Provide a procedure name or supported code and a city, state, known metro area or hospital. If the user says my area without a location, ask only for their city and state; reuse an explicitly supplied location. Do not ask cash versus insurance: cash/self-pay, insurer-specific rates and personal benefits are unavailable. Explain that limitation if those are requested. When a setting is unspecified, use and clearly label the returned catalog default; clarify only unresolved procedure/code choices. Returns commercial median facility rates, separate Medicare facility base-rate comparisons, source dates and an interactive Price Atlas view, comparing one code and care setting. Coverage, summary statistics and deterministic histogram bins describe all matching catalog hospitals before pagination; optional price sorting is also applied before pagination. The catalog is not a complete census of every hospital in the region. These are not 30-day or 90-day episode benchmarks or target prices. Do not call this tool to answer CJR-X/TEAM episode targets, episode spending, reconciliation, downside exposure or financial-risk rankings. Do not repeat identical code/setting/location searches when hip and knee resolve to the same MS-DRG. No coverage for a resolved hospital is a data limit, not a reason to retry the same hospital name or CCN. Public access shows up to five hospitals; expanded pages require verified member access when account linking is enabled. Do not use for personal out-of-pocket estimates, binding quotes, insurer-specific rates, ASC prices, quality rankings, medical coding advice or RVU lookup.