Claim Companion
Inspiration
Not long ago, I walked into a hospital to see a dentist. I had health insurance. I had been paying my premiums every month. I thought I was covered.
At the desk, they told me my policy did not cover the treatment and quoted me an amount I would need to pay out of pocket. I was confused. I started making calls. A lot of back and forth. Until a friend who works in insurance told me what had actually happened: my insurer had silently downgraded my policy during the economic downturn, without notifying me. No letter. No email. No call. They just quietly changed what I was entitled to and waited to see if I would notice.
I was angry. Not just because I paid out of pocket for a claim I should have won, but because I later found out that NAICOM regulations gave me real rights in exactly that situation. There were grounds to fight back. There was a letter I could have written that would have put my insurer on a legal timeline to respond.
I didn't know any of this. And that is exactly how they counted on me not knowing.
That experience is why I built Claim Companion.
What it does
Claim Companion is an AI-powered insurance claims assistant built specifically for Nigerian consumers navigating health and travel insurance claims.
It does three things:
Tells you exactly what to submit. Based on your claim type, your insurer, and your specific situation, Claim Companion generates a precise document checklist tailored to your HMO or insurer, with plain-English explanations of what each document must contain to avoid rejection.
Exposes the tactics being used against you. The Red Flag Alerts section identifies the specific delay and denial tactics common to your situation and tells you exactly how to counter each one, citing the relevant NAICOM regulations and consumer rights under the Nigerian Insurance Act 2003.
Writes your appeal letter for you. The draft letter is generated from your conversation, pre-filled with your insurer's name, the denial reason, and your specific medical situation. It cites the Nigerian Insurance Act 2003, the 15-day acknowledgement obligation, and the 45-day settlement timeline. It is ready to send.
Users can also upload their policy document or denial letter as a PDF, and the AI reads it to provide advice specific to their actual policy terms, not just general knowledge.
How we built it
Claim Companion is built entirely with MeDo.
I used MeDo's conversational app generation to build a multi-page full-stack application structured around the user's emotional state, not just their data needs. Someone dealing with a denied insurance claim is already stressed and confused. The flow needed to feel like a guide, not a form.
The onboarding screen collects two minimal inputs: claim type (health or travel) and situation (new claim or denied claim). This keeps the entry point frictionless.
The chat interface uses MeDo's multi-turn conversation capability to ask one focused question at a time, with each subsequent question shaped by the previous answer. When a user identifies their insurer as AXA Mansard, the AI's next question and eventual output are informed by what it knows about AXA Mansard specifically. The AI never delivers guidance inside the chat, its only job is to understand the situation, then route cleanly to results.
The results page uses a tabbed layout, Checklist, Red Flags, Draft Letter, generated dynamically from the conversation context. I used MeDo's PDF parsing plugin to enable document upload and analysis. The draft letter is downloadable as a PDF directly from the app.
The AI knowledge base covers all major Nigerian insurers and HMOs, NAICOM's regulatory framework, claim documentation requirements for both health and travel insurance, and common insurer denial tactics with specific counter-strategies.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was getting the draft letter to feel like a real, personalised document rather than a template with placeholders. Early versions of the letter still contained generic data even after a full conversation, the AI was not pulling context from the chat into the letter generation. It took several iterations of refining the MeDo prompts to ensure the letter populated the insurer name, denial reason, and medical situation correctly from the conversation.
The second challenge was keeping the AI focused inside the chat. The natural tendency of the AI was to start delivering guidance, numbered steps, action lists, inside the chat window itself before the user reached the results page. This broke the intended flow and undermined the tab structure on the results page. I had to explicitly instruct the AI that the chat's only role was information gathering, and that all guidance belonged on the results page.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The draft letter is the accomplishment I am most proud of. It is contextually generated, legally grounded, and practically ready to use. It cites Section 5 of the Nigerian Insurance Act 2003 by name, references NAICOM's 15-day acknowledgement and 45-day settlement obligations, and is tailored to the specific insurer and denial reason from the user's conversation. This is the letter I wish I had when I was standing at that hospital desk.
I am also proud of how specific the Red Flag Alerts are. Rather than generic warnings about insurance companies, the alerts are tied to the user's exact situation, naming the tactic being used, explaining why insurers use it, and giving a concrete counter-strategy backed by regulation.
Finally, the overall user experience, from landing page to downloadable letter , was built by one person in a matter of days using MeDo, which is a testament to how powerful the platform is for turning a real problem into a real product quickly.
What we learned
I learned how deep the information asymmetry problem is in Nigerian insurance. The knowledge gap between what policyholders know and what insurers know is not accidental, it is structural. Insurers benefit from consumers not understanding their rights, and very little has been built to close that gap for ordinary people.
I also learned how powerful MeDo's multi-turn chat capability is for building guided user flows. The ability to make each question context-aware, shaped by what the user said before, is what makes Claim Companion feel like a conversation with a knowledgeable friend rather than a form. That required careful prompt design, and MeDo made iterating on it fast.
Finally, I learned that the most important design decision in a product like this is restraint. The temptation is to give the user everything at once. The right approach is to give them one thing at a time, in the right order, when they are ready for it.
What's next for Claim Companion
The immediate next step is expanding the insurer knowledge base to cover more Nigerian HMOs and insurance companies beyond the current seven, including state-specific health schemes.
Beyond that, the three features that would make the biggest difference for users are:
Direct NAICOM complaint filing. If an insurer does not respond within the 45-day window, Claim Companion should be able to generate and guide the user through filing a formal complaint directly with NAICOM, closing the loop on the entire claims process.
Pidgin language support. A significant portion of the Nigerians who need this product most are not comfortable navigating a formal English interface. Adding Pidgin as a conversation option would dramatically expand access.
Policy downgrade detection. Users could upload their current policy document alongside an older one, and the AI would identify any coverage that was quietly removed, exactly the situation that inspired this product in the first place.
Built With
- medo
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