Health care sharing ministry operations

Your product is a promise. Auxilium is how you prove you are keeping it.

A ministry asks families to trust that a community will carry their medical bills. Auxilium measures whether that is happening — in dollars, per month, against a public benchmark — and makes sure no member goes quiet without anyone noticing.

See the demo ministry How claims integrity works

  • Every score explainable by hand
  • Nothing imported until you commit
  • No card to open the demo
A woman at a kitchen table in morning light, working through a stack of medical bills.
This is the moment the whole product is about.

Roughly 692,000 Americans belong to a health care sharing ministry, sharing more than $1.1 billion in medical costs a year. These organizations are exempt from state insurance law: there are no solvency requirements and no statutory obligation to pay a claim on any timetable. Membership rests on trust.

That exemption cuts both ways. It is also why an honest ministry currently has no straightforward way to demonstrate it is honest — and why, from the outside, a ministry doing this well can be hard to distinguish from one that is not. Auxilium exists to close that gap.

692,000

Americans in an Alliance-affiliated ministry

Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries — Data and Statistics

$1.1B+

shared in medical costs each year

Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries — Data and Statistics

0

statutory requirement to pay a claim on time

Georgetown CHIR — Health Care Sharing Ministry Data Point to Problems

Four failures this category keeps having

Each of these is documented in public filings and reporting. Each has a specific answer inside Auxilium — not a policy or a promise, but a number on a screen that a board member can read.

Nobody can say where the money went

Auxilium keeps contributions and disbursements on one ledger and computes the share ratio: of every dollar members gave, how many cents reached medical bills. It is benchmarked against the ACA medical-loss floor of 80.0% — a standard sharing ministries are exempt from, which is exactly why clearing it means something.

Pattern this addresses: Regulators have alleged organizations in this category retained the large majority of member contributions rather than sharing them.

Denials that cite nothing

Every denial must name both a reason and the published guideline provision that permits it. Auxilium flags denials citing a provision that does not exist, does not authorize that reason, or took effect after the member joined.

Pattern this addresses: Members across multiple ministries describe being denied with no stated basis and no route to appeal.

Claims that quietly stop moving

Every claim gets a turnaround commitment and a visible clock. Claims that breach it escalate on their own — and so do claims nobody has opened yet, before the deadline, because silence is what turns a delay into a complaint.

Pattern this addresses: Families have carried hospital bills for months past a ministry's own published turnaround because nothing in the process escalated automatically.

Data you cannot produce on demand

Claims are captured as structured records — procedure code, diagnosis, provider NPI, dates, amounts — so a hospital's records request is one export, not a reconstruction.

Pattern this addresses: A health system sued a ministry over unpaid claims; asked to verify the balances, the ministry could not produce patient names, procedures, dates, or account numbers.

Financial integrity

Answer the money question on a Tuesday, not in six weeks

Of every dollar members contributed, how many cents reached their medical costs? The ratio is computed continuously and measured against a floor sharing ministries are exempt from — which is exactly what makes clearing it worth something.

A month with contributions and no distributions is the loudest signal this system produces, so the query is built to make that month impossible to lose.

  • Contributions and disbursements on one timeline
  • Related-party payments broken out and disclosed separately
  • An opt-in public page with no member data in it

How the share ratio works

auxilium.app/integrity

Share ratio, trailing 12 months

Of every dollar members contributed, what reached medical costs

89.0%
ACA floor 80.0%

Health care sharing ministries are not held to this floor. Clearing a bar you are not held to is the point.

Contributions received$4,182,900
Shared to medical costs$3,722,781
Related-party payments$0 · disclosed
Months with money in, nothing out0

Narrative Relational Intelligence

A score you can add up by hand, and argue with

Four directions, scored separately, because a member can carry several at once. High Onus with low Cura is a billing problem. High Onus and high Cura is a family in crisis.

There is no model and no learned coefficient anywhere in the calculation. A score is the sum of the rules that matched, shown with their exact weights — because a system that cannot be argued with does not get trusted with pastoral care.

  • Ties break toward Cura — the hurting person outranks the expensive case
  • A dismissed signal returns when the facts get materially worse
  • The full rule set is published to administrators as a product page

How the scoring works

auxilium.app/members/grace-okonkwo

Grace Okonkwo

Okonkwo household · primary contact

Urgent
Cura 88

Someone is hurting

Onus 64

The case has stalled

Familia 41

Household complexity

Fides 22

Still in touch

Why 88, exactly

  • +40 Hospitalization logged in the last 30 days
  • +30 No contact recorded in 21 days
  • +18 Open prayer request past its follow-up date

A score is the sum of the rules that matched. Add it up yourself.

From a nine-year-old spreadsheet to a working board

The first hour is usually the part ministries dread most. It is designed to be the part that goes well.

  1. 1

    Upload whatever you have

    Byte-order marks, mixed date formats, embedded newlines, ragged rows, a column called "Mbr #". The parser was written for real exports rather than clean ones.

  2. 2

    Look at the preview

    Columns map themselves, duplicates are matched without fuzzy name guessing, and nothing at all is written to your members until you commit.

  3. 3

    Commit when it looks right

    Matched members are updated rather than duplicated. A blank cell means "not provided", never "delete what you know".

  4. 4

    The board is already populated

    Scoring runs as soon as members exist, so the first thing you see is who needs attention — not an empty state asking you to configure something.

The preview that stands between a messy file and your roster

auxilium.app/imports/new

members-export-final(2).csv

412 rows · 11 of 11 columns matched automatically

Preview
Mbr # → member_id Last, First → name DOB → date_of_birth Ph → phone HH → household
Ready to import396
Matched to an existing member12 · will update
Imported with a warning3
Blocked — no name on the row1

Nothing is written until you commit. A blank cell means “not provided”, never “delete what you know”.

Real output from the demo import: 11 of 11 columns inferred, an in-file duplicate skipped, an existing member matched by email and updated rather than duplicated.

And the day-to-day work

Integrity is the reason to buy it. Making sure nobody is missed is the reason staff open it every morning.

Narrative Relational Intelligence

Every member is scored on four directions — care, case weight, household complexity, and whether you are still in touch. Every score is a sum of named, weighted reasons. No model, no black box: you can add the numbers up by hand.

Roster import that survives real spreadsheets

Column inference, forgiving validation, and duplicate matching on email, phone, or name and date of birth. Nothing is written to your member list until you approve a full preview.

Household-first records

The sharing unit is the family, not the individual. Eligibility, share amounts, and most care conversations happen at that level, and the software works the same way.

Prayer and pastoral follow-up

Care requests ordered by urgency and overdue follow-up rather than by date, so the person who has been waiting longest is never quietly buried under newer ones.

Look at the demo before you talk to anyone

Two seeded ministries: one well-run, one reproducing the patterns above. Sign into either and compare the numbers. No form, no call.

Open the demo Read how the scoring works