I Tested AI to Find Errors in My Medical Bills. Here’s What It Found
I Tested AI to Find Errors in My Medical Bills. Here’s What It Found
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/chatgpt-medical-bill-errors/
Publish Date: 2026-07-09 10:00:00
Source Domain: www.cnet.com
I just celebrated a big milestone I hope you never reach: I hit my health insurance plan’s $10,150 out-of-pocket maximum less than five months into 2026, thanks mostly to two major eye surgeries. That means no more co-pays or coinsurance for authorized in-network care this year, as long as I keep paying my monthly premiums.
But earlier this year, as I accumulated what seemed like an eternal fountain of medical expenses, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I was paying bills that contained errors. As a certified financial planner and a longtime personal finance writer and editor, I’m familiar with how many medical bills contain mistakes that make them more expensive.
Occasionally, medical bills contain obvious errors, such as a charge for a treatment you explicitly declined. Otherwise, though, these mistakes are often difficult for a typical patient to spot. Finding billing errors can require clinical knowledge, along with an understanding of medical coding, revenue cycle management and the opaque American health insurance system.
You may also have to sift through huge volumes of information. For example, I discovered that I’d had 87 insurance claims during the first four-and-a-half months of 2026 and that the contract I’d signed during open enrollment was 149 pages long.
I had no desire to get an education on medical coding or meditate over the meaning of 149 pages’ worth of insurance jargon, but I thought perhaps generative artificial intelligence would be up for the task. After all, AI excels at taking in complex information and finding irregularities in huge volumes of data.
Turns out, though, using AI to find errors buried in my stacks of medical bills wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. Here’s how I did it — and what I learned.
How I used AI to search for medical bill errors
I expected to find a plethora of AI tools to help patients identify billing errors. Wrong.
Most AI tools aimed at improving billing accuracy are designed for providers, not patients, for obvious…
