Medicare Drug Spending

We created a dashboard that displays the cost of drugs over years 2011 - 2015 under Medicare. This tool was created to show insights on sudden changes in cost through the use of charts. Some of the preprocessing was done using Hadoop to display knowledge of Cloud Computing Applications (aggregating generic drug data).

This tool would be useful for anyone conducting research on the increasing of Medicare drug spending (Part D) and how it related to the annual part D premium increases published by the Social Security Administration.

Pre-processing Data and Dashboard Setup

The data we acquired was mostly clean and ready to use. However, we wanted to subset data based on the represented generic and non-generic brands. Hadoop was used for this step.

In order to handle on-demand user requests from our dropdown boxes, we created an API to return information for the chart visualizations. The dashboard and the back-end were set up using AWS EC2 and EBS where the filtered data was stored. We also included a load balancer. The front-end was created using basic HTML, PHP, and D3.js for visualization.

[Some photos of dashboard here…I think they’re in my SSD]