Statewide Rate Transparency.
The Michigan Public Health Institute sat on a large corpus of claims and public health data it could not put to work. With Aequalis, a payer rate platform one developer built with Claude Code, 3Pillars loaded every published BCBS Michigan and HAP rate, ran a behavioral health and substance use rate assessment, and gave MPHI its own seat on an MCP server so its people query the data in Claude.
Company Profile
The Michigan Public Health Institute (MPHI) is a nonprofit that works with government, academia, community groups and providers on public health programs. It holds a large corpus of data, including proprietary Medicaid and Medicare claims and Michigan public health data, and it wanted to professionalize that corpus and give it teeth: one structured, trustworthy view that is useful to the public and that it can also commercialize for plans, providers, specialty providers and health systems.
The Challenge
What MPHI lacked was utilization and pricing: what Michiganders actually use across the healthcare system around them, and what that care costs. Federal rules make health plans publish their negotiated rates, but the files are enormous, inconsistent and not built for analysis. Single payer files run from 5 to 200 GB, and a statewide read means more than 100 million raw rate rows before duplicates are removed.
The goal was better competition and better transparency across Michigan healthcare and public health, without MPHI building or staffing a data platform of its own.
What 3Pillars Built
3Pillars brought Aequalis, its payer rate data platform. One developer built Aequalis with Claude Code in about a month, against about six months for a conventional team build: the ingest pipeline, the enrichment and confidence scoring, the search index and the API behind it. From Q4 2025 through Q1 2026, 3Pillars loaded every published Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and HAP rate and ran a production deployment for MPHI.
3Pillars then worked the data with Claude in two ways: through the Aequalis AI Assistant, which calls Claude through the Anthropic API, and in Claude with rate extracts. Every published negotiated rate for both plans was reviewed, and behavioral health and substance use services were pulled out and compared across plans and provider groups. On the professional-rate medians for seven behavioral health and substance use codes, one plan ran higher on five of the seven, by 10% to 71%; substance use codes were sparse in both files. The main finding: MPHI could create a novel tool to identify cost savings.
Then 3Pillars built an MCP server for Aequalis, again with Claude Code, that exposes the platform’s governed endpoints as tools inside Claude Desktop and Claude Code, with per-payer routing, scoped API keys and role-based access. It went live in June 2026. MPHI has its own seat and uses it today: its people ask their questions in plain language and get answers from the live rate data, with no data engineering, no SQL and no exports.
In production and in use beyond the paid scope
MPHI paid for the initial specification; 3Pillars delivered beyond it, and what runs today is a live production environment in daily use. Aequalis holds every published BCBS Michigan and HAP rate, MPHI’s people query that data in Claude on their own MCP seat, and the outputs 3Pillars laid out in the February 2026 overview run from the same live data across the seven customer types in MPHI’s own business plan, from public good to paid: a quarterly Michigan affordability benchmark book, regional access dashboards for behavioral health and other key specialties, and a watchlist of high-variation services with the savings opportunity sized.
Results
Savings on the public health side are not measured yet; that measurement is still to come.
Functional Areas Touched
Highlighted nodes are the MPHI functions this deployment reaches today.