How to Use AI to Simplify Selecting a Health Insurance Plan
It's that time of year when chestnuts are roasting on an open fire and health insurance plans are available for open enrollment. Let's take a look at how using AI can make this easier to decipher.
Aside from human resources benefits aficionados, selecting which health insurance plan to have for the upcoming year is hardly an enjoyable process. For some, it can be downright paralyzing.
This is especially true for families where each partner is eligible for health insurance coverage, although the plans available to them might be from different insurance providers, thus complicating the decision.
Fortunately, there are PDFs available that outline the benefits and coverage that each plan offers.
These PDFs plus the context that about family background, healthcare usage, and financial constraints can be fed into AI to figure out which plan(s) are suitable.
A quick disclaimer
I feel comfortable providing the details below to a leading generative AI using a paid account, although my risk tolerance and approach to personal data privacy is likely different than yours. You are responsible for your own actions and any associated consequences.
Let's see how this works by exploring three aspects:
Building the initial prompt
Reviewing the response
Continuing the discussion
Building the initial prompt
Start by providing the overall goal that and what the rest of the prompt will include (note this is generally a good way to approach any first prompt).
I am evaluating between the health insurance plans that are attached as PDFs. I need your help deciding between these and have provided some background details. If there are other details that you need prior to responding, please ask.
It's worth uploading the PDFs, then continue building the prompt by providing additional details:
Family: age and gender
Health Status & Pre-Existing Conditions: body composition, fitness background, anything remarkable from last annual physical and labs, and pre-existing conditions or diagnoses
Medications: list each medication, how often the prescription is filled, and whether brand or generic
Usage: any primary care and specialist visits, plus whether each is planned (e.g. an annual physical) or unplanned (e.g. an ER visit, specialist for surgery)
Plan Financial Costs: monthly costs for each health insurance plan by name
Each of those topics is its own bulleted list within the prompt and uses consistent labels like "primary", "spouse/partner", and "dependent 1".
Here's an example of how I structured the family section in my prompt:
Family
Primary: 34 year old male
Spouse/Partner: 45 year old female
Dependent 1: 3 year old male
Reviewing the response
AI's response likely includes a table comparing the plans, making some observations, and provides a recommendation.
Here are a few tips:
Pay close attention to any mathematical assumptions made to ensure that it checks out (e.g. a monthly visit of $80 is annualized to $960, not $80)
If there is anything about the response that is incorrect, ask it to repeat its analysis with whatever corrections are necessary
If there is anything about the response that is unclear, ask AI to provide more details or justify its response
Continuing the discussion
It might be worth validating how a health insurance plan would have or will satisfy healthcare needs.
A couple of variations worth exploring are:
Which plan would have worked best for the current year's actual usage
Which plan will be best if X, Y, or Z occurs in the upcoming year
TLDR: AI can help decipher which health insurance plan to select based on context provided. Be mindful of what you share if you're concerned about privacy.
