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Patients Are Using Chatbots to Fight Medical Bills, With Mixed Results

While chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT can help narrow the information divide between patients and providers, they can also dispense flawed advice. As chatbots become a fixture in everyday...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.09 00:32 0

Patients Are Using Chatbots to Fight Medical Bills, With Mixed Results

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Patients Are Using Chatbots to Fight Medical Bills, With Mixed Results

While chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT can help narrow the information divide between patients and providers, they can also dispense flawed advice.

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Jackie Davalos, right, and her partner, Walter Kerr, used a chatbot to get advice on how to challenge a $22,604 hospital bill.

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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Sarah Kwon

April 8, 2026,

11:31 a.m. ET

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As chatbots become a fixture in everyday medical care, patients are using them not only to make lists of questions for doctors’ visits or decipher test results, but increasingly to pick apart the financial paperwork that follows, including challenging medical bills.

When Jackie Davalos, 34, received a notice from a collections agency that she owed $22,604 to a hospital for an emergency room visit after she fell down some stairs two years earlier, her partner, Walter Kerr, used the chatbot Claude to help challenge the hospital’s charges.

Mr. Kerr, 39, an executive at a global development nonprofit, said the chatbot had proved a useful adviser, “but not a perfect one.”

At a time when health care costs

top

Americans’ financial worries, more patients are turning to chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT as a no-cost, do-it-yourself way to navigate problems with medical bills or insurance coverage. The trend is significant enough that the American Hospital Association

has alerted

its members that patients are increasingly using artificial intelligence to help dispute bills.

Health care providers and insurers have used A.I. for some time, in ways that some people have suggested are intended to

maximize charges

and

deny claims

Chatbots might seem to offer patients a way to fight back. But critics warn that the tools can dispense flawed advice, especially to users who are less experienced in using A.I., or who do not have much knowledge about the health care system. And they note that chatbots are not bound by the federal privacy protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

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