The problem it solves

Healthcare billing in India is often confusing, opaque, and vulnerable to overcharging. Patients and their families frequently receive bills with inflated prices, duplicate entries, or unnecessary tests, yet they lack the knowledge or tools to verify whether these charges are justified.
CleanBill solves this problem by allowing users to scan or upload their hospital bill and instantly check it against standard government medical rate lists (PM-JAY, CGHS, NPPA). The system highlights possible overpricing, flags suspicious charges, and generates a ready-to-use transparency report.

People can use CleanBill to:

Verify if their hospital bill is fair and accurate

Detect duplicate, inflated, or unnecessary charges

Understand government-approved pricing for tests, procedures and medicines

Get clarity before paying large medical bills

Share the report with insurance companies or health authorities for dispute redressal

CleanBill makes medical billing safer, more transparent, and stress-free, empowering patients to make informed financial decisions during emergencies.

✅ Challenges I ran into

Building CleanBill presented several technical and real-world challenges:

1. Extracting Accurate Data from Bills

Hospital bills come in different formats—printed, typed, and handwritten. Bad handwriting and non-standard layouts made OCR accuracy difficult.
Solution: We improved text extraction using pre-processing (contrast enhancement, noise removal) and fallbacks that allow users to manually correct extracted data when OCR confidence is low.

2. No Public API for Government Medical Rates

Government-approved medical rates exist mostly in PDFs, not via API.
Solution: We extracted data directly from official PM-JAY, CGHS, and NPPA PDFs, converting them into a structured JSON database for fast comparison.

3. Comparing Inconsistent Naming Conventions

Hospitals often use slightly different names for the same test (e.g., “CBC Test” vs “Complete Blood Count”).
Solution: We built a synonym mapping system + fuzzy matching to ensure accurate comparison.

4. Maintaining Medical Transparency Without Giving Medical Advice

We had to ensure that the app does not interfere with diagnosis, only with pricing transparency.
Solution: We limited suggestions strictly to cost analysis and publicly available government rates.

5. Time Constraints of a Hackathon

Building an OCR-based medical billing checker with a complete UI in short time was challenging.
Solution: We focused on the MVP — bill scanning, rate comparison, fraud detection logic — and optimized our workflow with modular development.