The Care Concierge

CALL 1-585-440-7850 to try. Try asking for a knee MRI.

Inspiration

The same knee MRI can run you $450 at an imaging center or $2,800 at the hospital down the block. Hospitals and insurers have to post these prices now, but the files are a mess nobody can actually read, so people just overpay.

What it does

You call or text and say what you need, like "my doctor ordered a knee MRI." It digs through that messy public pricing data, calls around to the in-network places to check prices and openings, and books you the cheapest one. You save a few hundred bucks and skip the hold music.

How we built it

One Node app, Twilio for the calls, an LLM running the agent, and SQLite holding all the data. The calls to facilities are real, but the actual prices come from the database, so even if the audio gets garbled the numbers stay right.

Challenges we ran into

The tricky part was making the calls look live and dramatic while keeping the numbers rock solid underneath. Doing this solo, the hardest thing was knowing what NOT to build and just faking the boring stuff so I could put real time into the parts people actually see.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Real calls both ways, prices that show what you'd actually pay after your plan kicks in, and the agent ringing a bunch of places at once the way no person ever could. Built the whole thing solo in a day, with a hard stop that punts anything medical straight to 911.

What we learned

Turns out "public" and "actually usable" are two very different things. And letting people just text and get pinged back later beats making them sit on a call, by a lot.

What's next for The Care Concierge

Plugging in the real hospital and insurer price files so it's not running on mock data, and adding more than just MRIs, think labs, scans, specialist visits. Down the road, a dashboard for clinics to see where they're losing patients on price and wait times.