MedExplain

Inspiration

67 million Americans speak a language other than English at home. When they get a hospital bill, they don't understand it — so they just pay it. Even when 80% of medical bills contain errors. Even when they have rights they don't know about. I've seen this firsthand tutoring immigrant families at Bergen Community College. My own family has lived this. That's why I built MedExplain.

What it does

MedExplain is an AI-powered patient billing advocate. You upload any hospital bill, choose your language (English, Spanish, or Hindi), and get:

Plain-language summary — what this bill actually means
Flagged issues — overcharges, billing errors, and rights violations highlighted with severity levels
Conversational Q&A — ask anything about your bill in your language and get answers citing real patient rights laws
Appeal letter generation — one click produces a professional appeal letter citing 45 CFR §164.524, the No Surprises Act, and IRS 501(r). In English to send. In your language to keep.

What a billing advocate charges $300 for — MedExplain does in 6 seconds.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js 16 + Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui
AI: Anthropic Claude API (claude-sonnet-4-5) for multilingual reasoning, document analysis, and letter generation
PDF parsing: pdf-parse for text extraction, Claude vision for image-based bills
Deployment: Vercel
Built solo in 9.5 hours at the NJIT CBC Hackathon

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was prompt engineering the appeal letter to be legally precise without giving actual legal advice — a real tightrope. Getting Claude to fully translate letters into Hindi (Devanagari script) while preserving legal accuracy required careful system prompt design. Also survived a Next.js 16 + Turbopack build crash mid-hackathon.

Accomplishments we're proud of

A fully working multilingual medical billing advocate built solo in under 10 hours. The appeal letter generator feels like magic — it cites real federal regulations specific to the uploaded bill.

What we learned

How to engineer prompts for structured legal reasoning. The power of Claude's multimodal + multilingual capabilities. And that "what NOT to build" is the most important hackathon skill.