[ ABOUT ]
Richard Callaghan
I'm the founder of HospitalCost.com, independent consumer intelligence on top of public hospital pricing data, and VirginiaCourtFile.com, public-records analysis of Virginia criminal courts. Both built solo, toward one thing: public data made usable by the people it was collected about, and verifiable by anyone who checks.
By day, I'm a Senior Marketing Manager at Microsoft. The day job and the founder work aren't in competition. Both reward the same discipline: methodology over noise, the decision over the output, trust over reach. I write about what compounds across both.
I'm not building a price-comparison tool. I'm building something patients, journalists, and academics can rely on: independent, transparent about its sources, and held to a standard people can verify.
That's the work. Everything on this site is built around it.
[ WHAT I BELIEVE ]
Receipts a stranger can check
The method behind everything here. Publish the methodology and the source. Re-derive every public number from source the day it goes out. Break each check to prove it can fail. Then look at the live page the way a stranger would. Accuracy is a claim; the receipt is what a reader can verify without me.
Corrections in public
I've restated numbers on both sites after finding them wrong, and the notes live on the methodology pages with dates. If you won't show your corrections, you're asking to be trusted. You haven't earned it.
Write the decision down
Every real decision behind these sites has a dated entry: what I chose, what I killed, why. I read it before deciding again. It's the one record nobody else can produce.
The 2am test
The person reading a hospital price or a court record is usually in trouble and reading it late. If a page doesn't make that moment better it doesn't ship, whatever it would do for traffic.
[ WHAT I FOCUS ON ]
Civic Data Accountability
Public datasets the people they're meant to serve can't actually use
Trust Engineering
Building data tools people can verify, cite, and rely on
Decision Quality
The decision over the output. Frameworks that compound. Knowing what not to do.
[ BEYOND WORK ]
Off the clock:
Family
Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Let's connect
Building something in civic data, public-records accountability, or consumer-facing data products? Working with a journalist on a story I might be a source for? Always happy to talk.
Get in Touch