Predicting New York's Hospital Costs

In 2019, Donald Trump signed an executive order ordering hospitals to make the costs of common medical services publicly available. Yet, as of March 2021, many hospitals have been non compliant, making it difficult for patients to properly consider the effect of health services on their finances. This article details my creation of a ML XGBoost model to supplement the efforts of the executive order, as well as unexpected findings. Using user-entered values for Length of Stay, Disease Severity, and other variables, the model is capable of predicting hospital charges for three common infections: pneumonia, septicemia, and skin infections/cellulitis. The model is currently only applicable to New York State.