Your Healthcare Agent

Set Up Your Healthcare Agent

The 10-minute setup every other guide builds on

This is the foundation. Once you've done this once, you have a persistent AI agent that knows your healthcare situation and can help you with any of it — bills, denials, records, appointments, prescriptions, coverage questions. Every other guide on this site assumes you've completed these steps and links back here.

You can do this on a computer or a phone. It takes about ten minutes.

The 30-second version first

Before you set anything up, here's proof it works — free, no account beyond a basic one, nothing to configure.

Open claude.ai, start a chat, drag in a medical bill or an Explanation of Benefits (EOB), and ask:

"Read this and tell me in plain English what happened and what I actually owe."

That alone will translate the document that was designed to be unreadable. If that's all you need today, you're done.

The rest of this guide is for when you're dealing with something bigger than one document — a denial, an appeal, a life change, an ongoing fight — and you want an agent that knows your whole situation and keeps working on it.

What you'll need

If you don't have these as files, most insurer member portals let you download them in a few minutes once you log in.

On the $20: if it's not in the budget, the free version still does real work, one document at a time — the 30-second version above. Many community organizations are also setting this up on behalf of the people they serve. The tool shouldn't only work for people who can afford it.

Step 1 — Create your Project

A Project is a workspace that remembers everything inside it. Instead of re-explaining your situation every time, you brief the agent once and it carries that context forward.

  1. Go to claude.ai and sign in (upgrade to Pro if you haven't).
  2. Find Projects and create a new one.
  3. Name it something clear — "My Healthcare" works, or something specific like "Mom's Coverage" if you're a caregiver, or "Surgery Appeal" if you're working one issue.

Everything you put in this Project — documents and conversations — stays available every time you come back.

Step 2 — Give your agent its instructions

This is what turns a general-purpose AI into a healthcare agent that knows how to ask the right questions, what your rights are depending on your plan type, how to read each kind of document, and what your next moves are.

  1. Open your Project's Instructions (sometimes called custom instructions or project knowledge).
  2. In another tab, go to the instruction block published on this site (the CLAUDE.md). Copy the whole thing.
  3. Paste it into your Project Instructions and save.

You don't need to read or understand the instructions yourself. They're written for the agent. Pasting them is the whole job.

When you send your first message, the agent will greet you and ask what's going on. There's no vocabulary you need to know, and there's no wrong question.

Step 3 — Load your documents

Upload whatever you have into the Project. Each document teaches the agent something:

You can add more later. Even one or two documents is enough to start a useful conversation.

A note on privacy: it's fine to redact your date of birth, home address, and full member ID before uploading if you'd rather not include them — the agent can do its work without them. Everything else is useful context.

Step 4 — Tell the agent what's going on

Now just describe your situation in plain language. The more honestly you describe it, the better the agent can help. For example:

"I'm on a [plan type] plan in [state]. I had [procedure / appointment / event] and now I'm dealing with [a bill / a denial / a coverage question / a life change]. I've loaded my insurance card, my benefits, and the relevant documents. Where do we start?"

Watch what a well-briefed agent does: it won't just answer. It asks the questions that determine which rules apply to you — your state, your plan type, whether your plan is governed by state insurance law or by federal ERISA rules (which changes your protections). Those answers shape everything that follows.

From here, you're set up. Pick the guide that matches your situation and go.

Where to go next

The starter prompts

If you're not sure where to begin, paste one of these:

Part of the Your Healthcare Agent series. Billing is where the pain is loudest — but the goal is bigger: using AI as your agent across your entire experience as a patient. More guides at yourhealthcareagent.org.

This guide is for general educational purposes. It is not legal, financial, or medical advice. Your plan, your state, and your situation differ — always verify deadlines, amounts, and decisions against your own documents and official sources.