Nura

A smart, suggestive system that redirects Filipinos toward the healthcare privileges they already deserve — in the language they actually speak.

Inspiration

"Bawal magkasakit sa Pilipinas." We laugh at it. Because it's true.

Research shows only 12.2% of Filipinos in underserved communities use healthcare professionals as their primary health resource. Most turn to family, friends, or folk healers — not because they don't care about their health, but because the cost of care feels impossible. The Philippine Statistics Authority reported ₱615 billion in out-of-pocket health spending in 2024 alone. PIDS documented 1.2 million Filipino households in catastrophic spending that same year.

The painful truth? The safety net already exists. PhilHealth. Malasakit Centers. 4Ps coverage. Senior citizen privileges. These are rights written into law — Filipinos just don't know how to use them.

Nura doesn't educate. She redirects.

What We Built

Nura is a Taglish-fluent chatbot that takes your symptoms, your location, and your benefits — and finds the nearest accredited healthcare facility that will take you in, for free or at a discount, based on what you already have.

The system runs on two tracks:

Structured DB query (Supabase + PostGIS) — finds nearby facilities filtered by accreditation flags: PhilHealth, Malasakit, indigent programs, senior/PWD eligibility. Fast, exact, no hallucination.
RAG knowledge base (pgvector) — retrieves guidance from embedded Philippine health policy documents (RA 9994, RA 11310 IRR, DOH circulars) to answer "what do I bring?" and "how does this work?"

Location is collected through simple checkbox questions — no GPS needed. Benefits are resolved through a rule engine that infers PhilHealth coverage from 4Ps membership, stacks senior discounts on top, and flags Malasakit eligibility automatically. If the system detects an emergency mid-conversation, everything stops and it routes directly to the nearest ER.

Challenges

The data doesn't exist in one place. There is no single, clean, nationwide dataset mapping every healthcare facility to every benefit program. We had to cross-reference PhilHealth's accreditation PDFs, the DOH NHFR, the HOT OSM Philippines export, and the Malasakit Center directory — then stitch them together manually. This was our biggest bottleneck.

Scope vs. accuracy tradeoff. A nationwide system with incomplete data is worse than a city-scoped system with clean data. We scoped deliberately rather than overreach.

Keeping the LLM in its lane. The line between "identifying symptoms" and "diagnosing" required careful prompt engineering. Nura redirects — she never labels.

What We Learned

That the hardest part of healthcare accessibility in the Philippines isn't the absence of programs — it's the absence of awareness. The infrastructure exists. The laws exist. The benefits exist. What's missing is a bridge between people and what they're already entitled to.

Nura is that bridge.

What's Next

Nura is limited today by the quality of available public datasets. But every user interaction is a data point. With better data, a crowd-sourced wait time layer, a Barangay Health Worker mode, and a post-visit feedback loop — she would be unstoppable.

In a world where Filipinos are always being taken advantage of, let's stop the generational fear of healthcare avoidance and start taking advantage of what we deserve.

With Nura.