Millions of people rely on Medicare for healthcare access. In 2016, Medicare spending accounted for approximately 18% of U.S. GDP (https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet.html), but U.S. healthcare outcomes Attaining better and more cost-effective health outcomes for Americans relying on Medicare is a complicated problem with many facets. In this project, I attempt to take a modest step toward understanding how we might shift spending away from costly drugs with known adverse effects to reduce negative patient outcomes and spending at the same time.

Enigma (www.enigma.com) is a company that specializes in providing open datasets for tasks like this, and I utilized their Enigma Public platform to obtain the relevant Medicare data from their public repositories (https://public.enigma.com/).