How we research hospital financial assistance

CareRoute maintains plain-English financial assistance guides for 161 hospital systems across 50 metro areas. Every guide is built from the hospital's own published policy, the same documents its billing office uses, not third-party estimates or averages.

Our process

1. 1. We start with the primary source.

   For each hospital we read its official Financial Assistance Policy and charity care policy, the documents nonprofit hospitals are required to publish under Section 501(r) of the federal tax code.

2. 2. We extract the numbers that decide your bill.

   The income limit for free care (as a percentage of the Federal Poverty Level), the discount tiers above it, the documents you need, the application deadline, and the financial assistance phone number.

3. 3. We date and link every guide.

   Each page shows when its policy was last verified and links the official source, so you can confirm it yourself in one click.

4. 4. We re-check when policies change.

   Hospitals update their thresholds, often each year when new poverty guidelines publish. We re-verify against the source and re-date the page.

Primary sources, not estimates

Some tools report national averages for “typical” charity care eligibility. We do not. Where a third-party estimate conflicts with a hospital's published policy, we use the published policy and link it. If a hospital's policy is genuinely ambiguous, we say so on the page rather than guess.

Who builds these guides

CareRoute was founded by Jag Kondru, a former Goldman Sachs and Amazon engineer who negotiated dozens of his own family's medical bills, and Dr. Prathima Madda, M.B.B.S., a physician. Our approach to medical-bill assistance has been cited in a peer-reviewed review published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.