What Does It Cost to Age at Home?
An interactive dashboard exploring financial patterns across 7,236 Medicare home health agencies
Project overview
Key challenge
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes a rich public dataset with over 10,000 home health agency cost reports annually. However, the dataset lacks structure for interpretation or decision-making.
Without a clear analytical framework, the structural differences between agency models remain invisible, making it difficult to inform regulators, payers, researchers, or the general public about the true landscape of home health care costs.
Context
Individual graduate project · Institute of Design, IIT
Data Literacy · Instructor: Mike Oren
Outcome
An interactive data explorer that clusters 7,236 agencies ( after data cleaning) into six distinct operating models, allowing regulators, payers, researchers, and advocates to explore the sector on their own terms.
The analysis surfaced a structural gap in Medicare coverage: a cluster of 297 agencies delivering prolonged, ongoing daily living support — a need the Medicare benefit was not designed to fund.
Despite high visit frequency, these agencies cost $3,109 per patient annually — less than nursing home placement or a single fall-related hospitalization.
Impact
Made publicly accessible as an interactive dashboard, giving external stakeholders a structured view of CMS home health cost report data.
Industry
Healthcare
Eldercare
Time
5 weeks
My Role
Conduct design research
Synthesize research into diagrams
Draw illustration as facilitation
Develop funding strategy
Tool
Lovable ( AI-assisted rapid prototype)
Claude
Microsoft Excel
Context
Approach
