Cut Healthcare Costs with Price Transparency Data

A Practical Guide for Self-Insured Employers and Consultants

When the CMS Transparency in Coverage (TiC) rule went into effect in 2022, it promised to shine a light on the true cost of healthcare. What it delivered instead was chaos: massive, malformed JSON files, incomprehensible formatting, and no easy way for self-insured employers or consultants to put the data to work.

That’s exactly why we built Gigasheet for Price Transparency.

This isn’t just another portal that hosts rate tables. Gigasheet is different. We provide the full solution: a pipeline to clean and enrich raw MRF data, a growing catalog of pre-processed nationwide datasets, and the only interface that lets you explore and analyze these huge files without writing code.

If you want to find high-value providers, identify outlier costs, or hold your TPA accountable, you need more than a database. You need ground truth. You need tools that let you work directly with the data.

What Makes Price Transparency Data So Difficult

It’s important to understand why this data has been so hard to use. Even today, there are major challenges:

• File size: Insurance MRFs routinely reach multiple gigabytes
  
• Noise and garbage data: So-called "zombie rates" show providers billing for procedures outside their specialty
  
• Schema variability: Not all payers publish fields consistently
  
• Lack of context: No quality metrics, Medicare benchmarks, or taxonomy mapping out of the box
  

You can’t just open these files in Excel or upload them to your BI tool. The data is too big, too messy, and too unstructured.

The Gigasheet Solution: From Raw JSON to Actionable Insights

At Gigasheet, we built a platform that handles every step of the process:

1. Parsing and Structuring
   We ingest raw MRFs and clean up malformed JSON. Our pipeline normalizes column names, aligns schema mismatches, and deduplicates garbage data like zombie rates.
   
2. Enrichment and Context
   We join each row to NPI registry data, Medicare reimbursement rates, and optional quality metrics like MIPS. You can also bring your own enrichment data, from provider contact info to network intelligence.
   
3. Exploration and Filtering at Scale
   Our spreadsheet-style interface handles billions of rows. You can filter, group, pivot, and aggregate like you would in Excel, but with cloud-scale performance.
   
4. Sharing and Collaboration
   Save filtered views, publish them to stakeholders, or embed links in reports. Teams across regions can create their own perspectives on the same dataset.
   
5. Export and Integration
   Download filtered slices as CSV, or use our REST API to push data into your internal systems or warehouses.
   

This makes Gigasheet a unique offering. Most vendors provide either a limited view into the data or a portal that locks you into their own interface. We give you the data, the tools, and the flexibility to explore it your way.

A Real Example: Colonoscopy Costs in Dallas

Let’s say you’re a benefits consultant helping a self-funded employer in Dallas. You want to find providers who perform colonoscopies with lesion removal at a reasonable price and with high quality scores.

Using Gigasheet, we started with Aetna nationwide data and filtered it down to:

• CPT code 45385 (colonoscopy with lesion removal)
  
• Location: Dallas, TX
  
• Medicare reimbursement percentage: under 130%
  
• MIPS quality score: greater than 70

From over 1.8 million rows, we quickly narrowed to just those that meet our criteria. We were left with a set of providers that offer high-quality, low-cost care for a specific, shoppable service. That’s exactly the kind of insight employers and consultants need to steer members toward smarter choices.

Other High-Impact Use Cases

Beyond shoppable services, our customers use Gigasheet for a range of cost-saving and strategy-driving applications:

• Negotiation support: Benchmark your existing network and use real rate data to strengthen contract negotiations
  
• Network optimization: Identify overpriced or underperforming providers and refine your network strategy
  
• TPA oversight: Audit your third-party administrator’s claims about network pricing with real-world data
  
• Sales and recruiting: Some clients enrich the dataset with sales intelligence or use it to recruit high-value providers
  

Gigasheet also supports hospital MRFs and crosswalks between facility and carrier data, allowing you to see the full picture when it comes to negotiated rates.

Pre-Processed Data Available, Too

If you don’t want to start from scratch, Gigasheet offers nationwide pre-processed datasets covering thousands of CPT codes. These files are:

• Cleaned and structured
  
• Enriched with Medicare rates and full NPI metadata
  
• Ready for immediate use in the Gigasheet UI or export to your systems
  

You can buy a flat-rate license for these datasets and start exploring instantly. Or if you need something more specific, we can process MRFs by payer, region, CPT, or taxonomy. Get started today!