Medical data analysis service

A method for allowing patients to obtain health care information using a computer-implemented medical expense data analysis service, comprising:

• anonymizing and analyzing patient medical expense data of multiple patients from multiple insurance providers and multiple health care providers to produce anonymized and analyzed patient medical expense data;
• with at least one data analysis server associated with the medical expense data analysis service, maintaining a searchable community database of the anonymized and analyzed patient medical expense data;
• in response to a given patient of the multiple patients using a web browser to access the searchable community database at the data analysis server over a communications network, automatically comparing the medical expense data of the given patent with the medical expense data of other patients in the searchable community database;
• and
• providing to the given patient results of the comparison of the medical expense data of the given patient with the medical expense data of the other patients in the searchable community database.

A method for allowing a given patient to manage health care expenses using a computer-implemented medical expense data analysis service, comprising:

• with at least one data analysis server associated with the medical expense data analysis service, maintaining multiple patient databases that include medical expense data for multiple patients from multiple insurance providers and multiple health care providers, wherein the multiple patients include the given patient;
• at the data analysis server, analyzing the medical expense data for the multiple patients from multiple insurance providers and multiple health care providers from the multiple patient databases to check for errors in the medical expense data of the given patient, wherein analyzing the medical expense data comprises automatically discovering patterns and relationships in the medical expense data with data mining techniques;
• at the given patient, using a web browser to access the data analysis server over a communications network;
• using the web browser to provide the given patient with results from analyzing the medical expense data with the data analysis server that indicate whether the medical expense data of the given patient contains errors;
• anonymizing and analyzing the medical expense data in the multiple patient databases for the multiple patients from multiple insurance providers and multiple health care providers to produce anonymized and analyzed patient medical expense data;
• at the analysis server, maintaining a searchable community database of the anonymized and analyzed patient medical expense data;
• in response to the given patient using a web browser to access the searchable community database at the data analysis server over a communications network, automatically comparing the medical expense data of the given patent with the medical expense data of other patients in the searchable community database.