A financial barrier is a clinical barrier.
HelpBetter matches patients to the grants, charity care, and assistance programs they actually qualify for — and helps care teams get those applications submitted, tracked, and resolved. We built it because the money to help people is already out there. What is missing is the path to it.
Behind that work are two separate organizations with one purpose: HelpBetter, Inc., which builds and commercializes the technology, and HelpBetter Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that makes sure inability to pay never keeps a community organization or an underserved patient from benefiting from it.
The gap we close
The help exists. Reaching it is the hard part.
Assistance programs are fragmented across thousands of foundations, each with its own form, eligibility rules, and deadlines. The burden of navigating that lands on the patient at the worst moment of their life — or on a staff member who never had capacity for it.
Appointments per application
Patients seeking assistance met with financial navigators four or more times, on average, just to finish their paperwork. In rural communities, each of those visits can mean hours of driving.
Never apply at all
Nearly three out of four eligible patients in financial distress never submit an application. The help exists. The path to it does not.
Navigator, many counties
Rural hospitals rarely staff a dedicated financial navigation team. The work falls to social workers, nurses, and billing staff who are already stretched across service lines.
One brand, two organizations
Who does what.
A company can build durable technology. A charity can reach the organizations that will never have a software budget. We decided not to compromise either one, so HelpBetter operates as two legally separate entities that share a name and a mission.
HelpBetter, Inc.
The technology company. It owns the HelpBetter software and intellectual property, employs the engineering and product team, and sells the platform to organizations that can fund it at market rates.
- Software, IP, and product development
- Commercial contracts with health systems, hospitals, and insurers
- Enterprise navigator organizations and employers
- State and agency procurement, including rural health transformation work
- Equity capital and investor relationships
HelpBetter Foundation
An independent charitable organization. Its mission is expanding access to healthcare navigation, financial assistance, health education, and related technology for underserved individuals and the nonprofit organizations that serve them.
- The HelpBetter Access Program for qualifying nonprofits
- Navigator education and training
- Grants to community organizations for implementation
- Philanthropic, corporate, and community-benefit partnerships
- Outcomes research on financial navigation
Genuinely separate, on purpose
The Foundation is not a marketing arm. It is governed independently and is accountable to its own mission, its donors, and the communities it serves — not to the commercial interests of HelpBetter, Inc.
- Separate boards of directors, tax identification numbers, bank accounts, and books
- A written license governing the Foundation's use of HelpBetter technology and brand
- A conflict-of-interest policy requiring interested directors to disclose and recuse
- Any transaction between the two organizations decided by the Foundation's independent directors
The technology
One intake. Every program. A real person in the loop.
HelpBetter is a full workflow, not a directory. It finds the programs, prepares the applications, routes them for human approval, and tracks them to an outcome. The platform is built by HelpBetter, Inc. — and it is the same platform whether an organization buys it commercially or receives it through the Foundation.
Eligibility matching engine
Patients are hard-filtered by diagnosis and state, then ranked against every active and wait-listed program using weighted criteria — aid type, financial need, treatment status, and demographics. No cold-calling foundations to ask whether someone qualifies.
One universal application
Intake details and uploaded documents are captured once, stored securely, and reused across every program a patient matches. Document text is extracted automatically so the same information is never re-keyed.
Care navigator workspace
Navigators manage an assigned patient roster, work applications to completion, and transfer patients between staff through a secure handoff flow — so continuity survives turnover, leave, and coverage gaps.
Assisted submission, human approval
HelpBetter prepares submissions through charity APIs, web forms, and first-contact outreach — but nothing leaves the system until a navigator reviews and approves it. Automation does the typing; a person makes the decision.
Remote care meetings
Navigators and patients meet by secure video instead of requiring a trip to a facility, extending financial navigation to patients who cannot easily travel to one.
HelpBetter Academy
Plain-language guides on insurance fundamentals, appealing a denial, and negotiating medical debt — usable by patients directly and by staff as a training curriculum.
Partner and health system API
A server-to-server API lets health systems and SaaS partners enable organizations, onboard navigators, authorize patients, and retrieve a minimum-necessary view of application status — without duplicate data entry.
Web and mobile access
The full patient experience runs on the web and on native iOS and Android, so a patient without reliable home broadband can still work from a phone.
The HelpBetter Access Program.
The organizations doing the most financial navigation are often the least able to pay for software. A free clinic with two caseworkers serves patients in exactly the same financial distress as a regional health system — with none of the budget. The Access Program exists to close that gap.
Who qualifies
The Foundation sets its own eligibility criteria and makes its own award decisions. Organizations it serves include:
- Nonprofit community health centers and free clinics
- Federally qualified health centers and FQHC-affiliated nonprofits
- Rural health organizations and critical access hospital partners
- Cancer support and disease-specific patient organizations
- Nonprofit financial navigation and patient advocacy programs
Platform access
Licenses provided at no cost or deeply reduced cost, based on the size and capacity of the organization.
Training and education
Navigator training, continuing education, and patient-facing educational resources drawn from the Academy curriculum.
Implementation assistance
Onboarding, configuration, and ongoing technical support, so adoption does not depend on an in-house IT team.
Implementation grants
Where philanthropic funding allows, direct grants that cover the staff time an organization needs to get the program running.
For funders
Philanthropic support for the Access Program is leveraged: a single grant equips many organizations at once, because the underlying infrastructure is already built and maintained. Funding goes toward reaching more clinics — not toward rebuilding software that already exists.
The Foundation welcomes support from private and healthcare foundations, corporate philanthropy, hospital community-benefit programs, individual donors, and government and community grant programs.
What your support funds
- Platform access for qualifying nonprofit organizations
- Navigator training and continuing education
- Implementation grants covering staff time
- Patient-facing financial education resources
- Outcomes measurement and public reporting
HelpBetter Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Built for rural health transformation.
The CMS Rural Health Transformation Program directs $50 billion over five federal fiscal years to states rebuilding rural care. HelpBetter, Inc. contracts directly with states, agencies, and health systems deploying under that program and under state health transformation initiatives more broadly. Here is how the platform maps to each of the program’s five strategic goals.
Make rural America healthy again
Cost is a clinical variable. Patients who cannot cover transportation, housing, or a co-pay delay screenings, skip medication, and abandon treatment. HelpBetter routes them to the assistance that keeps a care plan intact, and pairs it with prevention-oriented financial literacy through the Academy.
Sustainable access for rural providers
Every dollar of charity or grant funding a patient secures is a dollar that does not become uncompensated care or bad debt on a rural hospital's books. HelpBetter strengthens the financial position of the facility at the same time as the patient.
Workforce recruitment and retention
HelpBetter removes the highest-friction administrative work from clinical and social work staff. One navigator can carry a far larger caseload without adding headcount — and the Academy doubles as onboarding curriculum for new hires in rural service roles.
Innovative care models
Health-related social needs — transportation, housing, utilities, food — drive outcomes and total cost of care. HelpBetter gives value-based and alternative payment arrangements an operational way to actually resolve those needs rather than only screen for them.
Technology-driven innovation
HelpBetter is consumer-facing health technology, remote care delivery, and cross-organization data sharing in one deployment, with role-scoped access control and human review built into every automated step.
Fundable categories
A single deployment spanning multiple approved use categories.
States applying to the Rural Health Transformation Program must select at least three permitted use categories. HelpBetter is relevant to several of them at once, which means one procurement can carry weight across a state’s portfolio rather than sitting in a single line item.
Category eligibility is determined by CMS and by each state’s approved application. We work with state teams and their grant writers to position HelpBetter accurately within the categories they select.
- Consumer-facing technology solutions that support disease prevention and chronic disease management
- Training and technical assistance for technology-enabled care solutions, including AI-assisted workflows
- Information technology advances — software supporting rural provider operations and data sharing
- Recruitment and retention support that makes rural clinical and support roles sustainable
- Innovative care models, including value-based arrangements that address health-related social needs
- Additional initiatives that promote sustainable access to rural health care
Accountability
Reportable from day one.
Transformation funding and philanthropic grants both carry real reporting obligations. Because every match, application, and approval moves through HelpBetter, the evidence of impact is a product of the workflow rather than a separate data-collection project — for a state agency and for a foundation program officer alike.
Reach
Patients enrolled, organizations activated, navigators onboarded, and counties covered — reportable by state and by facility.
Throughput
Applications started, submitted, and resolved; time from intake to submission; and the reduction in navigator touches required per application.
Financial outcome
Assistance awarded to patients, and the corresponding reduction in uncompensated care exposure for participating facilities.
Workforce effect
Caseload per navigator and administrative hours returned to clinical and social work staff.
Privacy and access control
Patient records are protected by role-scoped access — patients, navigators, participating organizations, and administrators each see only what their role permits. Partner integrations operate on a minimum-necessary basis, receiving application status rather than clinical detail. Automated submission steps always stop for human approval before anything is sent on a patient’s behalf.
Deploying at scale?
HelpBetter, Inc. works with state Medicaid agencies, health systems, hospitals, insurers, and the grant writers preparing their transformation applications. Tell us what you are building and we will show you where HelpBetter fits.
Serving patients without a budget?
HelpBetter Foundation works with nonprofit clinics, rural health organizations, and patient advocacy groups — and with the funders who make that work possible. Apply to the Access Program or support it.