Follow the Money
5,000 synthetic patients | Lifetime healthcare expenses in US dollars
0.611Spending Gini
43.2%Spending by the top 10%
$509,540Top 10% spending cutoff
Example patient: $1,048,378 in lifetime expenses | 98.4th percentile
SDOH: spending by income quartile
Next action: Review high-spending patients for care coordination and support needs, and check access barriers across income groups. Cost alone does not measure need.
Data and method
Source: richardyoung/synthea-575k-patients, using the first 5,000 patient records loaded in the lab. This is a synthetic sample, not a representative population estimate.
Mean lifetime spending: $188,952. Median: $97,135. Displayed dollar amounts are rounded to whole dollars.
The income comparison includes 5,000 patients. Unknown ZIPs: 1,269, retained in the income analysis and excluded from the notebook's geographic rankings.
Income comparison
| Income quartile | Patients | Mean lifetime expenses | Median lifetime expenses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 (low) | 1,250 | $51,820 | $14,798 |
| Q2 | 1,250 | $266,025 | $148,986 |
| Q3 | 1,250 | $291,041 | $148,041 |
| Q4 (high) | 1,250 | $146,922 | $118,706 |
Mean spending rises from Q1 through Q3, then falls in Q4. Income differences are descriptive associations. Age, illness, access, and years of accumulated expenses may influence comparisons. Lower spending does not necessarily mean less need for care.
The top 10% spending share uses patients at or above the 90th-percentile expense threshold. The example-patient percentile is the percentage of patients with strictly lower spending. The marker's height is the cumulative spending share at that position on the Lorenz curve, not the individual's share of total expenses.
Prepared using the instructor's lab notebook with ChatGPT assistance for code and explanations. Dashboard figures were checked against the exported Colab results.