[ FOUNDER · CIVIC DATA TOOLS ]
Consumer intelligence on top of
public data.
Most public data is technically available and practically useless. The work here is to make it usable by the people it was collected about, and verifiable by anyone who checks. That starts with hospital prices and Virginia's criminal courts, the numbers that hit people at the worst moment and nobody can read.
[ NOW, SEPTEMBER 2026 ] Re-deriving every number on HospitalCost.com after a pricing-file restatement, delivering the first paid practice reviews to Virginia defense attorneys, and finishing an essay on why a 100% dismissal rate is usually an artifact.
What I work on
One idea, worked from a different incident each time: a data tool earns trust by handing strangers receipts they can check.
[ 01 ]
Civic Data Accountability
Hospital prices and court records are public in the legal sense. Almost nobody can read them. The gap between posted and usable is where I work.
[ 02 ]
Trust Engineering
Anyone can publish a number. The work is publishing the source, the filters, and the date next to it, so a stranger can check it without having to trust me.
[ 03 ]
Decision Quality
I keep a dated log of what I chose, what I killed, and why. Most of what I've got right came from reading it before deciding again. Most of what I've got wrong came from skipping it.
Two sites, one method.
Hospital prices and Virginia criminal court records, rebuilt from the public files into something a person can read at 2am. Both run on the same rule: publish the method, publish the source, re-check every number the day it goes out.
HospitalCost.com
Founder · Independent
Virginia · North Carolina · named-payer rates
The real price of a procedure: the cash rate, the negotiated rates, and the hospital's quality and safety record, pulled from the files hospitals are required to post and finally made readable, so patients can compare before they commit.
VirginiaCourtFile.com
Founder · Independent
Statewide courts · case outcomes · attorney records
Virginia's criminal courts, indexed so you can see the pattern a single case can't show: how a charge actually resolves, by court and by attorney, with original research on how Virginia justice really works.
[ LATEST WRITING ]
Writing
Public Doesn't Mean Usable
Since January 2021 every hospital in the country has had to post its prices online in a machine-readable file. The average person still can't shop. Disclosed and usable are two different words, and the distance between them is where everything hides.
Why "100% of His Cases Were Dismissed" Usually Isn't What It Looks Like
The first time I saw a defense attorney with a 100% dismissal rate in the court data, my gut said that can't be real. The gut was right, but not for the reason I assumed.
Shipped Is a Claim About the World
My contact form never worked. My hospital pricing site went eight days without an update while every check I normally ran came back clean. The word 'shipped' was doing more work than I'd earned.