HELP App: making a hospital bill predictable before you get it
A mobile app concept I invented and designed to attack the 'insane hospital bill' problem: let people predict what a procedure will actually cost them, using price data crowdsourced from other patients' real bills.
The problem
Almost nobody knows what a medical procedure will cost them before they have it. The list price is fiction, the negotiated rate is invisible, and the actual number arrives weeks later in an envelope. Two people can have the same procedure at the same hospital in the same month and be billed wildly different amounts — and neither has any way to know that.
Every other market solves this with published prices. Healthcare does not, and the people who pay the bills are the only ones without the information.
The idea
If providers will not publish prices, the patients already have the data. Every explanation of benefits and every itemized bill is a real price paid by a real person at a real facility. Crowdsource enough of them and you can tell someone, before they walk in, roughly what this is going to cost at this hospital versus the one twenty minutes away.
The design problem is that the contribution has to be nearly effortless — nobody is going to hand-key a bill out of altruism — and the output has to be trustworthy enough to act on, from data that is inherently messy and self-reported.
This page needs your detail
The premise and framing above are yours; the specifics below are not on record yet. To finish this page properly I need: what prompted it (a personal bill? something you read?), how the contribution flow was designed to stay effortless, how you handled trust and messy self-reported data, what the main screens do, and how far it went — concept, prototype, or something you tested with people. It also predates the 2019–2021 US hospital price transparency rules, which is worth saying, because you were designing for a problem the federal government tried to solve two years later.
Why it belongs here
This is the earliest example of the thing I have done repeatedly since: pick a domain I am not an expert in, find the point where the existing system fails the person inside it, and design the thing that was missing. Nine years later that same instinct produced a nineteen-app construction platform. See Todos Build →