Healthcare and AI
With the recent AI boom making large language models readily available to the public, we have noticed many folks turning to chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok during open enrollment to analyze and generate questions about their healthcare options for the upcoming year.
As your insurance moms, and as professionals who have answered these questions for well over two decades, we are finding that the questions and topics folks are bringing us from their AI queries are causing more issues than they are helping. AI can be a useful tool in certain situations, and has the potential to be a helpful tool if you understand your healthcare usage and can specify how you intend to use a plan and at what volume. However, most folks do not have the time or resources to train it on their pre-existing healthcare data to generate accurate information.
Beyond basic math between the metallic tiers, we have found it consistently struggles to make informed or nuanced suggestions. We’ve also noticed it tends to calculate only the all-in costs, without considering how the person will use the plan or distinguishing between copays and deductibles. If you don’t know where to start when asking questions about your healthcare needs, asking AI to generate questions for your agent is also incredibly unhelpful. Once again, the information it generates is consistently generic and purposeless, and it often results in emails overloaded with irrelevant data and conflicting information.
Because of this, we strongly discourage folks from using AI for healthcare decisions. Throwing in questions you wouldn’t actually ask for yourself and math based on overarching data is ineffective in narrowing down a decision. It more often gets in the way when our agents are trying to connect with the human who will use the plan and their specific needs.
We know it can be intimidating to start asking questions when you don’t know what to look for. If you’re totally in the dark, a great place to start is at our Insurance 101 blog. It covers the basics of what you even need to be looking at for insurance. If you have certain doctors or hospitals you know you want to keep in-network too, narrowing down your options by network is a great starting point as well, and we have a blog here on how to find that information.
And of course, if you are overwhelmed by your options and don’t even know where to start, please reach out to us directly. We are happy to help you make your decision with a personal approach our clients know and love. We know it is a scary process, but you can count on your insurance moms to help you every step of the way!
