Appeally

Homepage on mobile
Form submission on mobile
Generated form on web
Homepage on web

Inspiration

Insurance claims have in house rejections of claims millions of times per year. They recommend a treatment option, and then get out of covering it. 70% of these non-coverages come from mental health related appointments severely disadvantaging an already underprivileged group of people.

Just 1% of people go through the appeal process as it is notoriously difficult by design. The results for these 1%? 55% get the reimbursement they need. The bottleneck here is accessibility.

What it does

Appeally makes this abuse from health insurers easy and accessible to counter. Simply submit the rejection email they send, enter a couple of details about your insurance plan and treatment, and our website will generate a report made for you to successfully appeal.

How we built it

As a group of CS majors, we typically are restricted from using AI coding tools. Hack Augie was a great opportunity to test these tools. Through an iterative design process focused on the user experience, we were able to both prompt Claude Code (vibe code) and classically program this app into a successful web prototype. Primarily this website runs on industry javascript frameworks (lucid, react, and vue). Our letter generation uses an Anthropic API call.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest hurdle was honestly research. Instead of bombarding the user with tons of features for differing use cases, we wanted to do a couple of effective features exceptionally well. Finding pain points of the user through reading about the appeals process helped us make the interface elegant, with only necessary yet robust features included.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our Web app's accessibility and modality. Users can provide really as little or much information as they want, getting an actionable appeal letter either way. On the accessibility side, mobile users enjoy a sleek and familiar layout. Both designs are intuitive, and require little knowledge to achieve the intended purpose of the app.

What we learned

This process was incredibly eye-opening into the power of leveraging AI coding tools for us. The process greatly expanded our capabilities of what we otherwise could have done in 24 hours. The design process was also unlike any other project I have been a part of. We really could think in context of the user since we had these tools to leverage. This will definitely impact all of our workflows in the future, especially in small teams like the one we were in. All three of us will be testing these tools to see how we can meld our CS backgrounds with the power these tools grant us.

What's next for Appeally

We really wanted to stick to the healthcare track on this project, with respect to the Hack Augie guidelines. However, there are plenty of other places that insurance companies prey on vulnerable populations. We would aim to enable actionable appealing processes to the following sectors: