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

More than 13 million Australians hold private health insurance, and over 15% of all healthcare spending comes straight out of individuals’ pockets. Those costs have climbed faster than inflation and faster than wages.

Specialists are the sharp end of it. They bulk-bill at half the rate GPs do, and a minority charge very large fees. People get bills they did not expect, and some of them simply stop seeking care. That falls hardest on people with chronic conditions and people with less money.

The Government committed to making those fees visible, and engaged us to build the tool: what services have historically cost, which specialists are nearby, and what they charge.

Solution

The MVP took nine weeks from a standing start. It integrated with the Department’s CMS, let the business team maintain its own datasets, and put in the continuous integration and data pipelines that pull source data through into the tool.

After that we worked with the Department on a roadmap of frequent releases rather than another big push. The architecture moved onto Azure and became API-first as it matured, with data flows sourcing specialist fee data out of the departmental CRM.

A lot of the work was translating business process into system requirements, alongside other vendors in a wider team under the Department’s direction. Across the public tool and the specialist portal, 47 production releases.

Later we added read-only APIs for industry: private health insurers, industry associations, medical practice software vendors. They get accurate fee data directly, which is a better route to broad adoption than asking everyone to visit a website.

Outcomes

Nine weeks to MVP. 47 production releases. More than 530,000 visits, grown organically rather than bought.

The system that exists now is API-first and cloud-native, with deep CRM integration and enterprise search, and it stays up when the CRM does not. Analytics are wired in well enough that the product team can act on what users actually do rather than what they were expected to do.

Technologies

Microsoft Azure, including Synapse, serverless functions, data flows and notebooks. API-first architecture with RESTful read-only APIs for industry partners. Reactive front-end as static web applications with serverless BFF APIs. CI/CD throughout. Enterprise search. CRM integration for the specialist portal. Phonetic search and accessibility testing. Analytics-driven iteration.