Salus

Salus: Protecting identity, restoring health. We stack insurance & aid locally to cut medical bills to $0. A zero-trust engine where your data never leaves your device.

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Salus: The Privacy-First Coordination of Benefits Engine

1. Inspiration: The Broken Promise

It started with a routine doctor's visit. I was prescribed a necessary medication, and my doctor looked me in the eye and said, "Don't worry, this is covered." I left the clinic feeling relieved.

But when I arrived at the pharmacy counter, the reality shattered that relief. The pharmacist ran my card and gave me a look of pity. "That will be $250. Your insurance rejected the claim."

I stood there, holding a prescription I couldn't afford, realizing that the system had lied to me. I walked away without the medicine.

This isn't just my story. In the US, medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. We call this "Financial Toxicity"—when the cost of care becomes as damaging as the disease itself. For millions of Americans, the "sticker price" of healthcare is opaque, arbitrary, and terrifying.

2. The Problem: The Coordination Gap

The tragedy is that funding does often exist, but it is fragmented across siloed systems. A patient might have:

  1. A Private Insurance Policy (e.g., Aetna, Sun Life)
  2. State/Federal Aid Eligibility (e.g., Medicaid, OHIP)
  3. Hospital Financial Assistance Programs (FAP)

Currently, these systems do not talk to each other. The patient is forced to solve a complex optimization problem with incomplete information.

Mathematically, the patient's burden () is currently defined as:

Where is often due to bureaucratic errors or high deductibles. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in public aid () go unclaimed every year because patients don't know how to apply.

3. The Solution: Salus

Salus is a local-first, privacy-preserving AI agent that acts as a universal Coordination of Benefits (COB) engine. It connects the dots between what you have (private insurance) and what you are owed (public aid) to drive your cost to zero.

Our goal is to change the equation to:

4. How It Works

Salus operates on a Zero-Trust / Local-First architecture. We realized that vulnerable populations (undocumented immigrants, the elderly) will never upload their SSN or Policy IDs to a cloud server.

  1. The Vault (1Password): We use Passkeys to decrypt a local browser vault. The user's Identity () and Policy Numbers are decrypted only in client-side memory.
  2. The Brain (Foresters Multi-Agent System): We use LangGraph to orchestrate four specialized agents:
  3. The Extractor: Uses Gemini 1.5 Pro to parse the $5,000 hospital bill.
  4. The Actuary: Queries our Mock Insurance Database to calculate private coverage (e.g., ).
  5. The Social Worker: Queries MongoDB Atlas Vector Search to find government laws (e.g., Medicaid) that cover the remaining .

  6. The Coordinator: Stacks these benefits and fills out the necessary PDF claims.

  7. The Voice (Verily/ElevenLabs): We use streaming voice AI to guide the user through the process in their native language, bridging the gap of health equity.

5. Why It Matters

Identity is the theme of this hackathon. Usually, we think of identity as "authentication." But in healthcare, your identity—your age, your income, your zip code—determines whether you live or die.

Salus protects your digital identity using cryptography, but more importantly, it restores your human dignity by ensuring that no one has to walk away from the pharmacy counter empty-handed.

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