12 ways to get ready for patients who bring their chart to a chatbot

As of this week, a patient with an athenahealth portal login and a paid Claude subscription can hand lab results, medications and visit history to an AI assistant and start asking questions. Athenahealth launched its athenaPatient MCP server Nov. 2, letting patients choose which parts of their record Anthropic's Claude can see, and company executives told Fierce Healthcare the launch is only a first step.

Patients were already doing this the hard way. About a third of U.S. adults use AI chatbots for at least one health reason, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 3,488 adults conducted in June. A quarter use them to figure out what's causing symptoms, and about 1 in 5 use them to understand lab results or a physician's diagnosis. Direct record connections remove the screenshots and copy-and-paste, which means more patients will arrive having already run your notes past a chatbot.

Practices can't control which tools patients pick. They can control how clean the chart is, how fast results get context and how staff respond when a patient opens with "my AI said." Here are 12 places to start.