Medical Cost Finder (MCF)

GoSource delivered and evolved Medical Cost Finder so Australians can compare historical out-of-pocket costs and find specialists near them.

Challenge

Over 13 million Australians have private health insurance, with over 15% of all healthcare expenditure coming directly from individuals as out-of-pocket fees. Healthcare costs have continued to climb, at times outpacing inflation and wages. High out-of-pocket costs disproportionately affect lower socio-economic individuals and those with chronic health conditions, who often forgo access to needed medical services due to financial barriers. Specialist services are of particular concern, as they are bulk-billed at half the rate of GP services and a minority of specialists charge very large fees, leading to bill shock, stress, and financial hardship. The Australian Government committed to improving transparency of out-of-pocket fees and engaged GoSource to build a tool that would allow Australians to understand historical costs for medical services and to find specialists near them along with what they charge.

Solution

GoSource delivered an MVP of the Medical Cost Finder in just 9 weeks from a standing start. The initial release integrated with the Department’s CMS, supported the business team’s ability to maintain datasets, and established continuous integration and data pipelines that ingested source data and made it available within the tool.

Following the MVP, GoSource engaged the Department to produce a product roadmap supporting iterative development with frequent releases. The system architecture was evolved to leverage Azure cloud services with an API-first approach. Data flows were designed and built to source specialist fee data from the Departmental CRM, with integrations surfacing this data via the MCF.

GoSource played a key role in mapping business processes to system requirements and collaborating with other vendors as part of a broader multidisciplinary team. The team drove feature development across both the public web tool and the specialist portal, delivering 47 production releases through modern agile methodology.

Read-only APIs were added for industry partners (private health insurers, industry associations, and medical practice software providers), facilitating direct access to high-quality, accurate fee data and providing a pathway for broader industry engagement.

Outcomes

• MVP delivered in only 9 weeks, integrating with the Departmental CMS
• 47 production releases delivered via continuous integration
• Over 530,000 user visits demonstrating strong organic growth and utility
• Evolved to an API-first, cloud-native system with deep CRM integrations and enterprise-grade search
• Read-only APIs enabled industry partners to directly access aggregate and individual fee data
• System designed to be maintainable, scalable, and resilient to CRM outages
• Enterprise analytics integration enabled the product team to respond quickly to user insights

Technologies & Methods

• Microsoft Azure Cloud (Azure Synapse, serverless functions, data flows, notebooks)
• API-first architecture (RESTful read-only APIs for industry partners)
• Modern reactive front-end frameworks (static web applications with serverless BFF APIs)
• CI/CD pipelines for continuous integration and deployment
• Enterprise search services
• CRM integration (specialist portal)
• Agile delivery with iterative product roadmap
• Phonetic search and accessibility testing
• User research and analytics-driven development

Team Size

Not specified