About ApprovalHelp

ApprovalHelpis the sidecar to your EHR for the parts your EHR doesn’t ship. Ambient AI scribe during the visit. Live 270/271 eligibility before every appointment. Prior-auth narrative generation across 90 specialty verticals and ~1,580 treatments. Appeal letters when claims get denied. Insurer-PDF auto-fill. Unified inbox that pulls patient messages, PA tasks, denials, and lab follow-up into one queue.

Your EHR still bills, prescribes, and owns the legal chart. ApprovalHelp makes the day shorter.

Why we built it

The AMA’s last study put prior-authorisation paperwork at 14 hours per week per clinician, growing 4-6% year over year. Most of that gets shifted to MAs and billers, but the clinician still owns the medical-necessity narrative — and that’s the part most EHRs don’t cover, because it requires a payer-policy library and ICD-10/CPT/step-therapy mapping most EHR vendors won’t maintain.

We built ApprovalHelp to be that missing piece, priced flat per clinician so it scales with people not with claims volume.

The wider context: under the Affordable Care Act, ERISA, the No Surprises Act, and Medicare Advantage program rules, every denial a plan issues has to come with a written reason and an appeal path. Plans publish coverage criteria. The criteria are knowable. The appeals are winnable. But the work is paperwork-heavy and the deadlines are short, and that is exactly the shape of problem a well-built workflow tool solves.

Who’s behind it

ApprovalHelpis built and operated by Michael John Ryan (“Mic”), a 42-year-old Sydney-based operator with a decade running Ryan Plant Hire (a hooklift waste-haulage business) and a granted Australian provisional patent + PCT filing on a concrete-washout containment bin (FB Rice 208410PRV / PCT). Mic is Founder and Privacy Officer of the parent company, DenialHelp, LLC.

The denial-appeal origin story is short and not fun: in 2023 a fire destroyed Mic’s home and exposed how brutally the insurance-denial system grinds down a claimant who’s already had the worst week of their life. He still fights Allianz and AAMI three years later. DenialHelp, the consumer-facing brand, was built so the patient-side version of that fight is winnable in five minutes instead of three years. ApprovalHelp is the clinician-facing companion: the person staring at the denial first is usually the prescriber, and the tool the prescriber needs is the one that drafts the appeal, tracks the deadline, and clears the in-basket without making the clinician learn yet another EHR module.

DenialHelp, LLC — the parent

ApprovalHelp is a product of DenialHelp, LLC, a Delaware-domiciled limited liability company (EIN 36-5178090, registered 1111B S Governors Ave # 50985, Dover DE 19904). One legal entity, two product brands: DenialHelp (patient/consumer) and ApprovalHelp (clinician). Both products run on the same hardened core: shared payer-policy library, shared appeal-letter engine, shared de-identification pipeline. Same compliance posture across both.

Privacy Officer: Michael John Ryan. HIPAA workforce training complete and on file. The privacy-officer mailbox routes to a monitored inbox, not a black hole.

HIPAA + BAA posture

We sign a Business Associate Agreement (HIPAA §164.504(e) compliant) with every paid practice on every paid tier. No upcharge for the BAA, no sales call, no “Enterprise only.” Self-serve plans see the BAA in checkout and countersign before the first PHI upload. Enterprise can sign on the customer’s paper. Subprocessors with signed BAAs: AWS (Lightsail, S3, SES, Textract), Stedi (eligibility clearinghouse), and Paubox (transactional email). Stripe is in-scope for payment metadata only (no PHI). Cloudflare sits at the edge with encrypted transit only (no PHI in path).

See /ah/baa for the full subprocessor list and the BAA itself, and /security for the technical compliance detail.

Compliance signals

• BAA available on every paid tier— not gated behind an Enterprise contract.
• Encryption at rest: PHI lives on a LUKS AES-XTS volume; the SQLite application database is encrypted (better-sqlite3-multiple-ciphers).
• De-identification pipeline before any LLM call: every text-to-LLM PHI path runs through a redact → gate → rehydrate pipeline. Direct LLM API access is the last resort; the default route is a subscription-billed Claude path with PHI pre-stripped.
• Sentry PHI scrubber: error reporting strips PHI keys and free-text before payloads ever leave the server.
• Audit-logged PHI access (HIPAA §164.312(b)) with a 6-year retention window.
• Audio scribe transcription on-server: the ambient-scribe audio file is transcribed by a self-hosted Whisper and the audio is discarded after transcription, not retained.
• HIPAA workforce training for all workforce members; certificates of completion on file.

What we are and aren’t

ApprovalHelp is workflow software. It is not a law firm, not a medical practice, not a clearinghouse, and not the legal-record system of truth. The clinician owns the chart, the submission, the medical judgement, and the signature on every generated narrative. Our job is to make the paperwork less painful and faster than the alternative.

Get in touch

Questions before signing up? Contact us or email hello@approvalhelp.com.