AIDE

• America's complex system of public benefits —the social safety net - has proven effective in reducing poverty and preventing adverse health outcomes, especially for children and seniors. However, government policies over time have led to lower investment in public services, contributing to issues with access, which disproportionately affects black and brown, low-income individuals and families

• Today, the U.S. social safety net programs are a complex web of programs and initiatives administered by local, tribal, state, and federal agencies.

• Signing up for your government benefits can be very confusing, with many Americans having incomplete or incorrect information when they sign up

• Many Americans do not participate in programs they are eligible for because they lack knowledge, are misinformed, have difficulty accessing a program due to administrative burdens—including onerous paperwork and documentation requirements and the stigma associated with needing help

• Improving outreach for safety net programs and easing onerous administrative burdens so that all individuals and families who need help can get it can significantly improve the health and well-being of many Americans.

The current situation is:

•UNWORKABLE: The current process for signing up for benefits is time intensive, opaque and there is a lack of trust in the entire process

•UNAVOIDABLE: 22.8% of Americans receive some form of social safety net benefit, and the number is likely to increase

•URGENT: With a rapidly aging population and a record rise in childhood poverty, there are more and more people turning to the social safety net for help

•UNDERSERVED: There is no comprehensive solution that allows Americans to find and apply for the help they need seamlessly

•  AIDE is a web-based platform that simplifies enrollment into safety net programs!

• AIDE de-mystifies and de-stigmatizes the process of asking for help

AIDE will:

• Quickly and accurately determine which of the eleven safety net programs you qualify for

• Easily apply for your benefits and track the progress of your application

• Proactively help you re-enroll for the various benefit programs yearly, based on your updated information

• The prototype will focus on Medicare and Medicaid/CHIP and eventually grow to incorporate all eleven safety net programs. (Medicare, Medicaid/CHIP, EBT, WIC, SSI, TANF, school lunch program, Section 8 Housing vouchers, public housing, energy assistance including the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program)

AIDE will help Americans get the help they need when they need it most!

• 40 Million Americans live in poverty, and safety net programs like Social Security Insurance and SNAP/ food stamps keep an additional 28.9 Million and 5.1 Million people out of poverty, respectively. AIDE will improve access to the US's most successful poverty alleviation programs. 

• According to the US Census Bureau, the child poverty rate in the US has doubled in 2022 (from 3.8 Million to 9 Million), increasing the likelihood of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including physical abuse, living with a parent who abuses drugs, and household dysfunction. Higher incidences of ACEs can have long-term health outcomes and be major risk factors for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempts. AIDE will improve access to nutritional aid, income support, access to healthcare, and housing assistance and provide parents the opportunity to focus on their child’s well-being instead of economic hardship. 

• According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 69% of Medicaid dis-enrollments in 2023r(approximately 13.8 Million people) were due to "procedural reasons," which include having outdated contact information or missing a deadline. AIDE will make application for Medicaid easier and will proactively work with families to maintain their benefits as federal and state regulations change

As immigrants, Syed (our CEO) and his family have had to rely on safety net programs like cash assistance and the school lunch program as we have transitioned into life in the US. 

As a physician, Syed partnered with social workers to help many patients get Medicaid, help with housing, help with food, and pay their utility bills. As a Value-Based Healthcare researcher, Syed focused on understanding how the US health insurance system works and how social determinants of health can determine health outcomes. 

Syed's personal and professional experiences have given him the drive and an understanding of the pain points when accessing public assistance. 

Kyler's (our CTO) father struggled with cancer for over 7 years. Social services were integral to his father getting medical care since he was unable to work after the first and second leg amputations. As his primary caregiver, Kyler learned a valuable lesson about how important access to healthcare is. With AIDE, Kyler sees an opportunity to provide people the access they need for a better quality of life, which the U.S. often falls far short of. 

The team's professional experiences provide them with the business acumen needed to lead a team to overcome challenges and the technical know-how to work with the data required to stand up AIDE. 

Over the past six months, we have conducted secondary research and customer and expert interviews to better understand US social safety net programs. 

We have partnered with the Area Board of Aging (ABA) in Charlottesville, VA. The ABA is a nonprofit that counsels seniors as they access their Medicaid, Medicare, and other social safety net benefits. We are working with their counselors to co-design the AIDE platform. The team is sitting in on counseling sessions to observe and map the counseling process.

We have a detailed map of each web page that will exist in the prototype, along with the flow of information, and we have had initial meetings with our software developer to begin transforming these mappings into a UI. 

We are also in the process of recruiting interns who can help us accelerate toward a prototype.

We are applying to solve:

• To get funding to recruit an experienced software developer who can speed up our timeframe to finish the prototype

• To gain access to a pool of talented problem solvers we can recruit to be part of our team

• To gain access to mentors, SMEs, and potential board members from the SOLVE network who can help us continue to evolve our thinking around AIDE and make it even better

• To be part of a community of like-minded thinkers and social entrepreneurs who will continually challenge us and hold us accountable

The innovation is multifold:

1.) AIDE's UI/UX will simplify the application process for public assistance. We are partnering with our local Area Board of Aging, a non-profit helping seniors access their government benefits, to co-design our Medicare/ Medicaid platform

2.) AIDE will have in-house education in multimedia and use artificially intelligent chatbots to provide additional and customized guidance

3.) Aide will optimize your application across all the social safety net programs and provide maximum access to needed public benefits while minimizing time investment. 

Making the social safety net more approachable and easy to use will open up possibilities for many low-income Americans.

Activity: Increased access to health insurance

Output: More people sign up for Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP

Outcome: More people have healthcare benefits. Increases health by utilizing services rendered 

Expanding Medicaid access by reducing burdens that obstruct people from signing up can steer them toward more preventative and primary care, which costs less than future emergency room visits when conditions do not get treated properly.

Cash assistance and in-kind benefits, such as Medicaid and Medicare, have been proven to reduce poverty directly and, as a result, improve educational attainment, increase future employment and earnings, and improve health and development in the near and long term for adults and especially for children.

Activity: Cross social safety net optimization engine -> automatically signed up for other benefits

Output: Increase use of social safety net

Outcome: Reduces poverty because more people are utilizing SNAP, WIC and other programs

A survey of people eligible for but not participating in SNAP found that 40 percent were deterred by the paperwork involved, and another 37 percent noted that the application was too time-consuming given their family and work responsibilities; other studies found that new income documentation requirements decreased participation.

It is simply not enough for the safety net to exist. People need to be able to easily and quickly access it. The only way to ensure that they can is by acknowledging and thoroughly addressing administrative burdens.

We are targeting UN Sustainable Development Goals 1.3, 2.1, and 3.8 using the indicators prescribed by the UN. We plan to measure our progress with a lean data approach, using a mix of secondary data collection and primary survey data from our users.

Goal: UN SDG 1.3: Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and achieve substantial coverage of the poor and vulnerable.

Indicators: The proportion of the population covered by social protection floors and systems.

Goal: UN SDG 2.1: End hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations

Indicators: 2.1.2: Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the population based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) 

Goal: UN SDG 3.8: Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential healthcare services and quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all

Indicators: 3.8.1: Coverage of essential health services

3.8.2: Proportion of population with large household expenditures on health as a share of total household expenditure of income

Our AI-powered solution, utilizing a range of advanced algorithms including traditional machine learning and deep learning, is an innovative approach that promises to simplify and optimize the user experience, ensuring that each individual can navigate these programs with ease and confidence. 

Our updated web interface, designed with user-friendliness in mind, will serve as a comprehensive guide to Medicare eligibility. It will also provide easily understandable educational materials, empowering users to make informed decisions. To further enhance the user experience, we have integrated a GenAI chatbot that will guide users through the decision-making process in a conversational manner.

We will also use machine learning to predict our customers' coverage needs. Given the vast number of insurance plans available, we plan to leverage natural language processing algorithms to analyze the insurance plans and predict the likelihood of each plan covering the required needs. As we will use machine learning, this solution is easily scalable across the 11 social safety platforms.

Syed Shehab MD: CEO and Co-founder. 

• Internal Medicine physician
• Senior Researcher and Senior Project Manager for the Value Based Healthcare Initiative at the Harvard Business School
• Current MBA student at the Darden School of Business

Kyler Halat-Shafer: CTO and Co-founder

• Co-founder of Anamorphosis Productions - a mental health start-up
• AI Consultant and Factotum to the COO @ IBM (North America)
• Engagement Manager at Neustar 
• Current MBA student at the Darden School of Business
• Current Masters in Data Science student at the University of Virginia

Two of us are working on the solution right now, and we are in the process of bringing on two interns for the summer months.

We began working on the solution in October 2023, just about 7 months. 

AIDE will actively pursue inclusive hiring practices and equitable professional development opportunities to foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. While our leadership reflects a spectrum of backgrounds including ethnicity and professional experience. In our upcoming interviews, we will continue to look for diversity in thought as well as sexuality, gender, and race. We will uphold structured interviews and be as diverse as possible in our hiring panels to minimize unconscious bias and focus on essential skills in job descriptions to attract a broad candidate pool. Our efforts are transparent and accountable, and we will be sure to have diversity reports accessible to all stakeholders as we grow, ensuring that we remain committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and supported.

Our business model allows for multiple revenue streams:

1. Medicare e-brokerage: AIDE will get paid a commission by the insurers and the government per sign-up.

2. Public benefits application processing: Contract with federal/ state/ local governments to become the portal through which they manage all public assistance applications.

To date, we have been self-funded but now we are looking for external grant funding to help accelerate through the development process. 

We plan to launch AIDE in October and are hoping to generate revenue through our Medicare e-brokerage model to continue to build our other capabilities that will help users access more of the social safety net through AIDE.