Althea

Demo

About

Althea is a patient financial-assistance platform and programmable charitable relief network built to intervene before an unaffordable hospital bill becomes medical debt. A patient starts with their hospital, bill amount, household size, income, and insurance status. Althea converts the hospital's Financial Assistance Policy into structured, explainable rules and shows whether the patient may qualify for free or discounted care. It then helps prepare the application, surfaces required documents and important timelines, and tracks the hospital's decision. The hospital—not Althea—makes the final eligibility determination. But hospital assistance does not always eliminate the entire bill. That is where the Althea Care Network begins. When a verified residual balance remains, Althea searches available charitable funding programs and assembles eligible relief across independently governed pools. For example, a $500 grant can combine $250 from the Althea General Medical Hardship Fund with a $250 matching grant from a partner foundation. Foundations, employers, and charitable organizations can create rules-based USDC relief programs with defined budgets, grant caps, matching ratios, expiration dates, and settlement restrictions. Althea's Care Agent evaluates the verified case state and available programs, then routes approved capital through a programmable settlement flow on Arc. Funds are first reserved and only released toward the verified medical obligation when the required settlement conditions are satisfied. Unused or expired reservations can return to the charitable pool instead of being stranded. In our demo, an $18,420 hospital bill receives $15,950 in simulated hospital financial assistance, leaving $2,470. Althea then assembles a $500 charitable grant from multiple funding sources, reducing the remaining balance to $1,970. Patients never need to understand wallets, gas, bridges, or crypto, and sensitive information such as names, diagnoses, income, medical records, and hospital bills remains offchain. Althea's goal is simple: The financial help may already exist. Althea makes it usable. And when that help stops short, Althea turns independent charitable capital into a programmable relief network.

How it's made

Althea is built as two connected systems: an offchain patient financial-assistance navigator and an onchain charitable relief network. The patient experience is built with Next.js, React, and TypeScript. Hospital Financial Assistance Policies are converted from unstructured documents into a structured policy schema. AI assists with policy extraction and plain-language explanation, but financial calculations are intentionally deterministic: household income, Federal Poverty Level thresholds, policy rules, estimated discounts, and relevant timelines are calculated in code rather than delegated to an LLM. Every result can be traced back to the underlying policy source. Sensitive patient information stays offchain in our application/database layer. The blockchain never receives the patient's name, diagnosis, income, insurance information, medical record, or hospital bill. After the hospital assistance process, Althea switches into the Althea Care Network. World Selfie Check is used as one liveness and abuse-prevention signal before a patient can access Althea's separate, limited charitable Care Fund. We intentionally do not use World to gate hospital financial-assistance rights; a patient can search policies, estimate assistance, and prepare an application without completing a biometric check. Privy is the institutional wallet and control layer. Althea and participating foundations can operate organization-controlled wallets with policies restricting which contracts, networks, amounts, and financial actions are permitted. This lets a foundation commit capital to a Althea matching program without giving our agent unrestricted access to its treasury. Privy also lets us hide normal crypto complexity from fund administrators and donors. On Arc, we deploy programmable USDC care pools. Each funding program can define a budget, per-case grant cap, matching rules, and other restrictions. Rather than performing a simple token transfer, Althea supports a multi-step settlement flow: verified case → funding programs matched → USDC reserved → approval conditions satisfied → provider settlement confirmed → USDC released Our new multi-funder flow allows several independently governed programs to contribute toward one verified medical obligation. In the demo, Althea contributes $250 and a foundation's 1:1 matching program contributes another $250, assembling a $500 grant automatically. The Althea Care Agent, built with Circle Agent Stack, reads structured case and program signals such as the hospital decision, verified residual balance, World verification state, available program liquidity, grant limits, and approval status. The agent can discover the appropriate funding route and orchestrate settlement, but it cannot change grant rules or freely move treasury funds. Deterministic rules, Privy wallet controls, and Arc smart-contract limits constrain what the agent is allowed to do. Our Arc smart contracts include protections such as authorized executors, program-level grant caps, duplicate-case protection, settlement-address validation, available-balance checks, and pause controls. We use USDC as the dollar-denominated settlement asset. The result is a system where the patient sees a simple financial-assistance experience while the infrastructure underneath coordinates multiple charitable organizations, programmable wallets, autonomous agents, and conditional stablecoin settlement. In our demo: $18,420 original bill − $15,950 hospital assistance = $2,470 residual Althea then finds: $250 Althea General Fund + $250 Foundation Match = $500 programmable relief After settlement: $1,970 remains. We don't tokenize the patient, and we don't tokenize their medical debt. We use blockchain where it adds real value: coordinating independent charitable capital, enforcing funding rules, and making the movement of relief funds verifiable without exposing the person who needed help.